Seven Generations From Now: An Indigenous Teaching For Modern Times
How will our current actions impact the human beings living two hundred years from today? Within the mainstream entheogenic movement sweeping through the UK, Europe and the Americas, the operational focus is almost entirely short-term. Corporate wellness startups evaluate success by quarterly financial growth, clinical training groups measure progress by immediate client trial outcomes and retreat guests frequently seek instant personal transformation. Western culture is fundamentally conditioned to prioritise rapid results and immediate consumption.
True entheogenic stewardship requires a complete shattering of this hyper-individualistic timeline. To navigate medicine work safely and ethically, we must align our practices with ancient earth-based values: most notably, the ancestral Haudenosaunee principle of Seven Generations stewardship. This teaching dictates that every decision we make today, from how we harvest a plant sacrament to how we construct an educational curriculum, must be weighed against its consequences for the seven generations who will inherit the earth after us.
Defining Long-Term Ethics in Entheogenic Spaces
To apply ancestral values to the contemporary wellness ecosystem, we must define the structural components of generalised thinking:
Generational Stewardship: An ethical framework that replaces short-term financial extraction with long-term ecological and cultural preservation, safeguarding resources for ancestral lineages yet unborn.
Temporal Colonialism: The modern corporate practice of dominating, harvesting and exploiting ancient ecosystems or cultures to feed immediate, short-term Western market demands.
Biomedical Integrity: Expanding clinical definitions of consumer safety to include the permanent ecological sustainability of the environments where these natural sacraments live.
Structural Lifespans: Short-Term Extraction Versus Generational Stewardship
The Venture-Backed Startup Model
This framework relies on quarterly extraction, meaning client intake numbers are scaled rapidly to meet immediate investor return targets. It creates transient transactions that deliver quick psychological relief without building long-term local community relationships.
The Seven Generations Collective Model
This approach focuses on deep cyclical tending, which means restricting intake volume based entirely on regional plant abundance and local community capacity. It builds structural, generational reciprocity by creating legal networks that continuously fund local habitat restoration and indigenous language preservation. This operational pivot shifts the industry foundation away from infinite commercial expansion and back toward long-term systemic balance.
The Clash of Temporal Realities
The contemporary mainstream wellness industrial complex operates on borrowed time. Venture-capital investment forces psychedelic startups to race toward market dominance, creating high-ticket training frameworks that prioritise speed over spiritual maturity. Facilitators are certified through accelerated clinical modules, substances are synthesised for rapid mass consumption and traditional rituals are stripped of their historical context to make them scale efficiently.
This unchecked velocity ignores the explicit warnings issued by global assemblies like the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which continuously highlight how short-term resource extraction decimates traditional territories. When a plant medicine or a traditional ceremony is commercialised for immediate Western optimisation, the long-term cost is born by the living earth and the indigenous communities who kept these traditions alive. Wild habitats of sacred medicines are decimated by over-harvesting, traditional cultures are economically displaced and deep spiritual structures are flattened into shallow technical protocols.
Generational stewardship demands that we actively slow down. It invites modern practitioners to realise that we are not the owners of this entheogenic movement: we are merely its temporary passengers. True safety cannot be found in an insurance policy or a clinical checklist alone. It requires that we hold a deep, active accountability to the future, asking ourselves if our modern practices are feeding a temporary trend or protecting an ancestral heritage.
An Independent Collective Grounded in Generational Vision
Be the Medicine was established to stand firmly against the frantic pace of the commercialised wellness market. We are explicitly not a standard training organisation or a corporate retreat provider. We operate as an independent collective of practitioners, ceremonialists, artists and decolonial guides who believe that medicine work must be rooted in Earth-based traditions, prayer and absolute reverence.
We choose to work with extended, slow timelines because we understand that deep human and cultural healing cannot be rushed to satisfy a corporate balance sheet. Our shared spaces are designed to foster long-term relational depth, helping a new generation of guides move past the role of a detached technician and step into the lifelong responsibility of an earth steward.
This commitment to the future shapes Beyond Protocol, our six-month online training programme. Now entering its second year for the 2026 / 2027 cohort, this landmark educational journey brings practitioners together in community to learn directly from true culture bearers who embody generalised wisdom.
Our international faculty includes:
Grandma Margaret Behan, a lifelong traditionalist, Cheyenne elder and member of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers.
Dr Alta Piechowski-Begay, a proud Navajo woman, school psychologist and founder of the Hozho Voices of Healing Center.
Metsa Nihue, an internationally known ceremonialist specialising in traditional Amazonian lineages with fifteen years of dedicated training.
Charlotte Duerr James, a healing justice facilitator and ceremonial practitioner who co-founded New Old Ways.
Philip Carr-Gomm, a psychologist, psychotherapist and author whose work beautifully integrates Western psychology with ancestral earth spirituality.
By gathering with these lineage keepers, we intentionally align our work with the long view of history. We step completely out of the extractive cycles of the corporate wellness complex and step into our collective responsibility to the ancestors who walked before us, the communities who stand beside us and the children who will walk this earth seven generations from now.
