Hi everyone, thank you for all the work you do to research and share information about frauds and plastic shamans. I’ve been a long time lurker, and I have benefited from information you have shared.
I’m Babeloner in Vancouver BC. I’m English, and spent most of my life in US and Canada. My family has been immigrating from place to place for the last 4 generations, with an Irish and English ancestry. I’m in my mid 30s, and after 15 years adventuring in woo woo trying to find my own cultural traditions, I’ve definitely encountered some frauds along the way! I feel like there has been an uptick in the last 2 years of the “next generation” of fake shamans, and what’s sad about it today is how people in my generation are well versed in cultural appropriation language, but folks are still being fooled. For example, I was recently at a women’s gathering where teachers needed to commit to (no sign of accountability) getting permission from their teachers to teach (nice in theory), but a bunch of the teachers themselves learned from frauds like Alberto Villolbo. So.... getting one’s teacher’s permission to teach doesn’t solve the problem.
Anyways I’m here to share what I know and support where I can, because we Europeans and descendants of European settlers have many rich cultural traditions of our own, in that there’s no need from a healing point of view to steal other people’s practices or dress up basic counseling or ceremonial services as something more “exotic.”
Thank you for having me here.
