What's It Worth?
Contemplations on the value of my work as a medicine guide and imagination farmer
“How much is enough?” is a question that arises often in my work as a medicine guide and space holder.
Finding the sweet spot with the right dosage, the right amount of breakthrough, the perfect amount of intensity to ensure impact, the just right amount of runway in and out of the experience, the right amount of anticipation or integration… It’s a stunning calculus and assessing it for each of my clients - and then delivering - is one of the things that, I think, sets me apart as a guide.
These days ‘medicine guides’ and ‘sitters’ and ‘retreat facilitators’ are abundant. Many licensed therapists are also now finding creative ways to include psychedelics beyond Ketamine into their practices and there really is no shortage of options anymore for people considering this healing modality.
It’s a good thing that, even with roadblocks on the legal pathways, still, the mushrooms will get where they’re going. The way knows the way.
I’ve been a professional in the space for about 8 years now. My practice was already in service when Michael Pollan’s book, “How to Change Your Mind” throttled psychedelics back into the mainstream and, from my humble hill in the Northwoods, I watched the industry boom and bloat and become just another market sector ripe for leveraging, tangled in academia, and oppressed by science.
Early on, a flurry of professionals flocked to my hill and brought their colleagues. Psychiatric residents, psychotherapists, psychologists, social workers, and nurse practitioners were - and are - a big slice of the demographic that sought me out. Eventually - and still - a growing network of therapists across New England began to refer their clients and colleagues here.
There wasn’t a lot of booming or bloating but, it’s true, Rootstock did bloom. I worked furiously both inside the medicine retreats, of which I booked more than a sustainable workload to try and honor the need and hone my skills. When I wasn’t actively supporting clients I was administering the ‘back end’ of my work trying to take good care of the business and then, in my ‘free time’ I built the temples and homestead that is now the imagination farm we know and love called Rootstock Retreat.
Session after session I cultivated an approach, developed a protocol, honed a practice, and rooted into something I now call the Medicine Retreat. This is my signature 36 hour immersive offering and, with over 730+ in the books since 2018, that’s well over 8,000 hours of practical experience leading therapeutic sessions, not including the thousands of hours with intake, preparation, integration snd the development of one of the best microdosing protocols out there.
It’s a doctorate.
It’s a large body of work and a deep body of wisdom and it was earned, one beating heart at a time, one risk taken at a time, one bold decision after another to say ‘yes’ and show up and serve. Over and over again.
In the last couple weeks I have experienced 3 different community members project something onto me about how I’m ‘charging too much money’ for my sessions and, well, it’s been a rich contemplation and feels ripe for exploring here in words and figures. Let’s unpack this…
When your heart skips a beat you find the best cardiologist in the city because he’s the best, right? Spare no expense on the plastic surgeon who can fix your sagging neck? No problem. When your kids can’t pass their ACTs you have no problem finding the best tutor you can, right? Will you pay a premium for the lawyer that will win? When your favorite musician comes to town it’s easy to spend money on tickets to seem them, obviously.
We value mastery in many parts of our lives but our wide-open consciousness?!?!?!? It’s too much. Let’s squeeze it into an afternoon session with somebody who ‘doesn’t really do this but will’ or find some well-meaning person on Guides-R-Us who will do it for free ‘cause they’re learning? Let me say it again…your wide, open consciousness.
Being an above-ground underground guide has come with it’s fair share of exile and outsider syndrome and the full scope of how the industry doesn’t know how to deal with me is a heartshare for another day but let’s come back to ‘how much is enough?’
My one-on-one sessions consistently change people’s lives in genuinely lasting ways - not because I simply dose them with mushrooms, but because I facilitate their transformation of themselves in an alchemical pot that is unlike anything available anywhere - costs $3333 for a 36 hour session.
$92.58/hour gross.
36 hours of my undivided attention while they nest in a well-appointed, private log cabin inside a homestead and imagination farm filled with gardens and temples and meticulously-loved land, shoveled paths, and treasures that I, myself, tend. I fire them 800 gallons of chemical-free, wood-fired water in a bath house deep in a cedar forest and feed them organic food that I, or my neighbors, grew before sending them back into their lives both changed and prepared to bring the change home. They leave with their playlist, a 2 week integration protocol, and tools to make the meaning they seek. They have access to free or by donation integration circles every month and discounted coaching hours for follow-up.
It’s a stunningly authentic, radically effective, and truly honest way of doing this holy work. And I do it. And it works.
Every. Dang. Time.
Subtract the overhead of the basics of hosting (accommodations, food, linens, utilities, …) and I’m hovering around a little less $60/hour. But let’s keep going…. Let’s honor the scholarships and discounts that I inevitably say yes to. How much can I give away? How helpful can I be? payment plan, sure? Extra night, ok.
Let’s keep going…
How much is the risk I take to share this worth?
What about my experience, the doctorate, what’s that worth? What about the value of 800 gallons of pristine mountain water heated with wood just for you? What’s the sun ripened tomato that I started from seed and picked fresh for you worth? What about my staff? What are they worth? Does their love and service warrant more than $25/hour to hold the tender, beating hearts of people in deep grief or primal fear or clean poop buckets following a group session?
How much do you make an hour? A year? Is it enough for all that you give in exchange?
Lucky for me, I know what this work I do is worth.
Luxury fashion Beana, an identity of years gone by, knows a thing or two about marketing luxury and extracting as much money as possible for something average. There are tons of coaches on the internet making millions helping other people make millions on their chat GPT written courses and hyped-up masterminds. That’s not what’s happening here, friends. I am charging the bare minimum - not even close to enough - to share something that money can’t come close to valuing….my love, my home, my sweat, my scholarship, my devotion, my curation, my time, my prayers, my community, and, oh yeah, my expertise.
Nowhere will you find a place like Rootstock or a guide like Beana. This isn’t to say that there aren’t absolutely wonderful people doing profound work in the world - there are! - and many of them are charging much more than me for an 8 hour session in a NYC apartment though you will surely find some that charge less too, but, those of you who have had the opportunity to work with me and inhabit this world that I built for you - whether you personally like me or not - know this to be true. What I do here isn’t simply a mushroom journey. It’s bigger and stranger and sweeter and deeper and realer than that. I am stewarding and animating a temple, a vortex, a chrysalis, an alchemical pot, a mushroom journey, and this magical combination of person, place, and intention, well, it’s as real as anything ever was. In this plastic wrapped hellscape we call late stage capitalism, real is more precious than…more precious than…what even is precious anymore?
What do you value? Bitcoin? Silver? Your vacation days? Followers? Quiet moments when your kids are sleeping? Perceived security?
The poles are shifting in this upside down world that we call reality and people are getting more and more confused. Confused, homogenized and desensitized and further and further away from the organic intelligence that earth medicine wants to help us reconnect with. The mundane and holy work of house holding and gardening and chopping wood and carrying water are being outsourced to roombas and robots and what started out as a schtick has become my mystical activism and revolutionary act of defiance…keeping it real.
It costs something to live a life where I can offer something so simple and so real. Land that sings because it’s prayed over constantly, work that overflows with potency and promise because it’s my sole focus, time to actually arrive to, marinate, and integrate what you gain…
It takes everything to choose this rugged, real path over one more easeful and lucrative. I could skip the hot tub, squeeze you in and out in 24 hours, let you bring your own food and, sure, all of this could cost less…. But that’s business, not devoted service and it’s not what this is about or why I get out of bed in the morning. I’m not doing this to make money. I’m doing this to be able to keep doing this.
I have given everything I have to be able to share everything I am with my clients and community and they are better for it. I am better for it. The Earth is better for it. Every dollar that I and Rootstock made in the last 8 years of our work together has, like a torus, poured right back into this place, this land, and this community with the sole purpose of simply keeping the wheel turning. Yea, there’s improvements and maintenance and projects that eat money but all of them are for it. For you.
No off-shore accounts amassing wealth at your expense. The wealth that’s being generated here is a wealth of transformation, a wealth of elemental healing, a wealth of beautiful connections, a wealth of humble tasks to do and keep doing, a wealth of GoFundsMes to donate to, a wealth of small businesses to support, a wealth of investing in a place that I love, and a wealth of desire to keep serving.
The economics of abundance demand that I value myself, my time, and my work in a way that lets me keep doing it. All of it. The folks that value me for my time doing medicine work is what allows women and men to gather here monthly in our free community circles, to offer 100 hours of sacred fire and community love every October, to turn the wheel of the year with our stone circles for little or no money, and to sustain monthly free integration circles and info sessions to stay accessible to anybody who thinks I can help them.
What’s it all worth?
The promise of psychedelics is that they have the power (and desire, I think) to take us beyond science and medicine and especially business-as-usual forward to a more conscious understanding about the world, the Earth, interdependence, and reality. Nothing feels more important right now than helping people come back into sovereignty, presence, and wholeness. Nothing feels more important than helping people reclaim a reality that’s worth living inside of and, what kind of Lighthouse would I be, if I myself wasn’t practicing what I preach? Sacrificing myself so that I am not perceived as ‘being greedy’ by people that don’t understand the full ecosystem of my work, community offerings, or homestead? This fear of being rejected or abandoned by people that don’t understand me is one of the primary things that my very work helped me decondition. Self-worth is not the same as net-worth and peoples opinions of me are not the same as my opinion of myself. Shame is too dense an energy to schlep around, especially when it’s other people’s and they gave it to me to carry without my consent.
I reserve the right to be misunderstood and I welcome questions and comments about the worth of 60 years of sunlight pouring into a maple tree, a women finding and felling that tree, bucking that tree, splitting and stacking that tree, and then waiting a year for it to dry, so she can feed it, log by log, to a fire for you to enjoy 30-60min of true elemental healing in deep winter after your medicine journey. What’s it worth to float in 800 gallons of amniotic fluid on a snowy night in the woods and be reborn into yourself and as an engaged citizen of the Earth?
And, because I still care a bit about what you think (old habits die hard), I took some time to help you understand my logic, my pricing strategy, and my thoughts on this sensitive, but important, topic.
I charge exactly enough, not more or less.
What happens here is priceless. It’s worth it. I earn it and it feeds what’s holy, not just what’s hungry.
I pray that the people who value me and what I have to give will do so joyously, generously, and freely and I trust and know that I will give them everything I have, am, know, and love in service of their highest healing.