Is This Work Sacred? Or Just Expensive?

May 12

It’s a question I’ve heard more than once—sometimes asked outright, sometimes whispered between the lines of a raised eyebrow or a hesitant “I’ve been thinking about doing a journey, but…”

Is this work sacred? Or is it just expensive?

The price tag on legal psilocybin facilitation in Oregon is not small. A single journey, even modestly priced, can run you over a thousand dollars. For that amount, you could take a week off work, fly to Mexico, and probably find a shaman—or at least someone with a woven poncho and an ayahuasca vine necklace—offering to take you deep into the spirit realm. You could buy a year's supply of therapy. You could pay your rent. So it’s worth asking: what are you really paying for?

Because if you strip away the marketing language and soft-lit forest imagery, what’s left? Is it healing? Is it ceremony? Is it a luxury product wrapped in spiritual packaging? Is it all of those things, or none of them?

This is where things get messy.

There is something undeniably sacred about the work we do. Not sacred in the holy-book, priest-on-a-pedestal way—but sacred in the way that quiet things are sacred. In the way breath is sacred. In the way grief is. When someone steps into that room, when they lie down on that mat and put on that eye mask, they are offering something precious. They are consenting to be vulnerable, open, unguarded. They are saying, “I’m willing to look at the parts of myself I’ve spent years avoiding.” That’s not a transaction. That’s a ritual. Even if we don’t call it one.

And yet.

You can’t ignore the economics. You can’t ignore the fact that for most people—especially people outside of white, middle-class, wellness-adjacent circles—this “sacred” work is wildly out of reach. You can’t ignore that an entire industry is coalescing around what was, until very recently, the domain of underground practitioners and cultural traditions that never charged four figures for access to the divine. You can’t ignore that “accessibility” is something we talk about on our websites, but not always in our business models.

It’s hard to hold both truths at once: that this work is powerful and meaningful and that it is embedded in a system where healing gets priced and sold. That the facilitators pouring their hearts into this work still have to pay their rent. That the service centers trying to make things affordable are also trying to survive licensing fees, insurance costs, real estate pressures, and a state regulatory system built more for cannabis than for communion.

And somewhere in all of that, a client shows up. A human being who doesn’t care about the policy debates or the culture wars. Someone who just wants to feel better. To understand themselves. To forgive. To be free of the weight they’ve been carrying. And they walk through the door, and you sit with them, and you witness them dissolve and unfold and remember. And in that moment, it does feel like ceremony. It does feel sacred. Even if it’s happening in a room that costs $900 a day to rent, with mushrooms that were lab-grown and compliance-checked and state-certified for therapeutic use.

We want the work to be sacred. We want the container to be clean. But we live in a world where everything is for sale, and nothing exists outside of capitalism. And if we pretend otherwise, we risk drifting into performance. We start selling “authenticity.” We start promising transformation like it’s a product line. We start confusing the appearance of sacredness for the thing itself.

So maybe the better question isn’t whether the work is sacred or expensive—but whether we, as practitioners and participants, can stay honest inside of that tension. Whether we can name the cost without cheapening the meaning. Whether we can honor the mystery and pay the bills.

Because the truth is: it’s both. It is sacred. And it is expensive. And it is worth interrogating what we’re doing, and why, and who gets left out when we pretend that spiritual work happens in a vacuum, free of history or privilege or economics.

The mushroom doesn’t care if you’re under a tree or on an imported leather futon. But we should care. We should care about who’s in the room, and who isn’t. We should care about whether we’re building a culture of healing or just a new wellness industry with better branding. We should care about the cost—not just in dollars, but in who we become when we stop asking these questions.