I remember one session where I had to break therapy training that says “do not direct”, meaning to avoid leading, interpreting, or offering solutions. This is the model promoted by modern day clinical therapy, that the therapist provides empathy, authenticity, and unconditional positive regard, allowing the client’s own inner resources to guide the process.
For example, In psychedelic-assisted therapy, the non-directive model means the guide remains mostly silent, offering minimal prompts, and trusting the participant’s “inner healing intelligence” to shape the experience.However, in this session, I put healing before clinical practice.
It was during a non-ordinary state of consciousness with a woman who was Mestiza, figuring out her health challenges alongside her indigenous roots in the Amazon. Her voice cracked as she whispered, “My grandmother is here I think?”
Most therapy manuals tell us to remain quiet or to reflect back with a neutral question. Yet I could feel the weight of the moment-and I felt her grandmother too which is not uncommon to have ancestors present. To stay silent would not be reverence; it would be abandonment. I leaned closer and said softly, “Yes, I believe your grandmother is here, in fact I feel her here too.
Welcome her and let her know you are ready for her teachings” She sobbed in relief as she connected through her body with her grandmother. After this session, her stomach issues dissipated and she was able to welcome in future generations. In that moment, I reaffirmed something I have felt in my bones for years: silence is never neutral. It can heal as much as it can also wound.
This paradox sits at the heart of my work. In Western psychedelic therapy, non-directive support is treated as the gold standard. The guide should remain neutral, avoid interpreting, and trust the client’s “inner healing intelligence.” I respect this approach, and I use it often. Silence has power. Yet, through my own practice and through the teachings of First Nations Elders, the communal ceremonies of Bali, and the insights of psychodynamic therapy, I have learned that healing is relational. And relationships cannot be reduced to one universal rule.
For this reason, I walk both paths. Sometimes I lean into silence, and sometimes I step forward with words, ritual, or acknowledgment. No matter where I am sitting, I hope I live the best I can in this: healing is never only pharmacological, and never only individual. It unfolds in webs of relationships, such as with ourselves, with therapists, with ancestors, with land, and with communal relations.
The Medicine of Silence and the Wound of Silence
I have seen silence carry healing in its purest form.
In one session, a client drifted into a vision of infinite darkness. “It feels endless,” she whispered, “but I am not afraid.” I said nothing. The silence in that room was alive. She later told me that it was the quiet itself that had allowed her to find her strength. My silence became her mirror, and she met herself in a new way. In that moment, silence was sacred.
But silence can wound just as deeply. The Mestiza woman who saw her grandmother in the ceremony needed affirmation, not neutrality. Elders and Knowledge Keepers have taught me that ancestors are not “metaphors”; they are relations who arrive to guide, share, and support. To withhold acknowledgment in that moment would have repeated the colonial wound of erasure. It was a simple sentence: “Yes, your grandmother is here” , that became the healing she needed.
Silence always speaks. Sometimes it says, “I trust you to find your own way.” Sometimes it says, “You are alone.” The art is in knowing which one the moment requires.
Ceremony, Relationship, and the Balinese Way
I also carried this teaching with me into Bali, where I witnessed how healing can be profoundly communal.
I attended a full moon ceremony at a village temple, dressed for the first time in my white Balinese head scarf gifted to me. The humid air was thick with incense. Stone shrines flickered with candlelight. Families gathered in white sarongs, carrying woven baskets of offerings such as fruit, rice, and flowers balanced on their heads. Children giggled between prayers, and elders pressed their palms together with deep reverence.
When the gamelan music began, the metallic rhythms cascaded in endless cycles, hypnotic and alive. I felt the vibration not only in my ears but in my chest, my bones, even the soles of my feet. My breath slowed. My body seemed to fold into the same rhythm as the crowd.
The priest sprinkled holy water over bowed heads, chanting prayers that seemed to weave invisible threads between everyone present. Then a young woman nearby began to cry. From the perspective of western/modern healing approaches, we would think: “Stay neutral, let her find her own meaning.” However, the community itself responded. A neighbor laid a hand on her shoulder. The musicians shifted the rhythm. Voices rose in song. The priest invoked her grandmother by name.
Here, healing came not through silence but through affirmation, through song, through the collective recognition that she was not alone in her pain. The ritual itself held her. The kind of silence we are often trained to value would not have been sacred here; it would have been abandonment.
I walked away from that temple with my chest still humming from the gamelan, and my heart opened by the power of communal response. Healing, I understood more clearly than ever, is not always found in the quiet. Sometimes it is in the collective song, the guiding words, the presence of many woven into one.
Closer to home, I have always heard the same teaching such as in Cree ceremonies: healing never happens alone, it happens in relationship with spirit, with land, with ancestors, and with community. In First Nation communities, silence is not neutral; silence is neglect.
Even in psychodynamic therapy, the illusion of neutrality has been dismantled. I remember a woman who was in the depth of a non-ordinary state of consciousness, who turned to me and whispered, “Please, just tell me I am safe.” To remain silent would have reenacted her childhood neglect so I said the words she needed to hear: “You are safe, and you will be safe here with me.” For her, that sentence was the turning point, the long-awaited emotional experience she could finally trust.
Walking Both Paths
This is why I follow both ways. Silence has its place. It can protect autonomy, it can create space for deeply personal discoveries, it can allow a person’s inner strength to emerge without interruption. But silence is not always enough. Sometimes silence abandons. Sometimes the healing comes from words, from ritual acknowledgment, from the steady presence of a hand on the shoulder or a voice naming the ancestors. All containers are already directive. Silence directs in one way, words in another, music and ritual in yet another. The task is not to eliminate influence which is impossible, rather to make one’s influence ethical, transparent, and relational.
Healing is relational at its core: it unfolds in relationship with the self, with the therapist, with ancestors, with community, and with land. To honor this, our containers must be pluralistic. They must hold silence and speech, autonomy and guidance, solitude and song.
As I do my best to communicate, psychedelic healing is not simply pharmacology and it is not solitary introspection. It is woven through webs of meaning, culture, and community.
WALLACE MURRAY
Psychotherapy | Coaching | Facilitation | Educator | Urban Shamanism | Psychedelic Assisted Therapy
