Reclaiming the Sacred in Modern Medicine: The Guna People
In a world racing toward the future of mental health with lab coats, digital clinics, apps, and venture-backed bio-tec startups, it’s easy to forget where the psychedelic road truly begins.
It begins with earth.
It begins with spirit.
And often, it begins with Indigenous peoples whose lineages stretch back long before the word "psychedelic" even existed.
One such lineage belongs to the Guna people, an Indigenous group living in the semi-autonomous territory of Guna Yala (formerly San Blas Islands) along the Caribbean coast of Panama. Though lesser-known than Amazonian ayahuasca cultures, the Guna are the quiet holders of powerful spiritual and medicinal traditions, rooted in a worldview where healing is not an intervention, but a restoration of harmony.
In today’s global psychedelic renaissance, the Guna remind us that medicine isn't something you take, it's something you build relationship with.
Who Are the Guna?
The Guna (also spelled Kuna) are a resilient, culturally rich people with a population of over 60,000. Spread across island archipelagos and the mainland rainforest, they are fiercely autonomous, having fought for their independence in the Guna Revolution of 1925, which led to the formation of their semi-sovereign territory. This spirit of self-determination also infuses their relationship with the sacred, especially the use of plant medicine, cosmology, and dreams as tools for healing and insight.
At the heart of Guna society is a deep spiritual framework that governs life, health, nature, and the unseen world. Unlike the clinical models emerging in the West, Guna healing does not separate the physical from the spiritual, or the psychological from the environmental. Their healers, called neles, act as intermediaries between the spirit world and the human world, often entering trance states, dreamwork, or altered consciousness to diagnose and treat illness on an energetic level.
This is psychedelic therapy—but rooted in culture, myth, song, and spirit.
Plant Medicine Beyond the West’s Gaze
The psychedelic world often gravitates toward the “big names”: ayahuasca, psilocybin, iboga, San Pedro. But across Guna Yala and parts of northern Colombia, the Guna have used local psychoactive and visionary plants as part of their spiritual and healing repertoire for generations. While some of these are more subtle than the well-known entheogens, their ceremonial use is often amplified by chanting, drumming, fasting, and sacred storytelling, making the entire experience immersive, communal, and transformative.
Dreams, plant knowledge, and spirit guides are triangulated into a diagnostic system, one that defies Western reductionism and instead honors the interconnectedness of all things.
And here lies a profound truth: the Guna don't view healing as the elimination of symptoms, they see it as a rebalancing of relational integrity with the cosmos, the ancestors, the land, and the body.
Psychedelic Therapy without the Substances
Perhaps most radical to the Western mind is the idea that you don’t need a chemical compound to journey.
Guna healing rituals rely heavily on songlines, dreams, sacred tobacco, and nawuala (spiritual guides). The nele may use these tools to access visionary realms and retrieve information from ancestors or forest spirits. Illness is seen not as a "disorder" but as a spiritual misalignment or a transgression of natural law—requiring ceremony, community, and energetic repair.
This is not metaphor. For the Guna, it is daily life.
In many ways, they remind us that psychedelic healing is not only about compounds—it is about consciousness, ceremony, and coherence with the web of life.
The Risk of Erasure
As the global appetite for psychedelics grows, the danger of cultural extraction grows with it. Indigenous knowledge, painfully earned and carefully preserved over generations, is at risk of being commodified, rebranded, or erased altogether.
The Guna, like many Indigenous cultures, face threats from rising sea levels, ecological degradation, and cultural assimilation. Their contributions to sacred medicine are vastly underrepresented in mainstream psychedelic discourse, not because they lack wisdom, but because the industry often prioritises what can be quantified, patented, or sold.
Yet what the Guna offer cannot be bottled. It can only be honoured, learned from, and protected.
Why This Matters for Psychedelic Therapy
We stand at a crossroads. The psychedelic movement is poised to either repeat the mistakes of colonial medicine—or evolve into a model that is integrative, inclusive, and reciprocal.
Here’s what the Guna can teach us:
Healing is not just personal—it’s ecological and spiritual.
Medicine is not a substance—it’s a relationship.
Ceremony is not an accessory—it’s the container for safety, insight, and transformation.
As psychedelic-assisted therapy expands into luxury retreats, mental health clinics, and digital apps, the Guna offer an ancestral reminder: without ritual, reverence, and rootedness, the medicine loses its soul.
Moving From Extraction to Collaboration
Imagine a future where psychedelic healing centers don't just “borrow” Indigenous terms and aesthetics, but actively collaborate with Indigenous wisdom holders.
Where profits are shared.
Where rituals are respected.
Where cultural protocols are followed, not just for optics, but out of ethical alignment.
Supporting the Guna doesn't mean placing them on a pedestal or appropriating their culture. It means centering Indigenous voices, offering resources for cultural preservation, and recognizing that we are not the first to walk this path, we are simply being invited to walk it more humbly.
Final Thoughts: Reclaiming the Sacred
If psychedelics are to fulfil their promise, not just as therapies, but as technologies of the sacred, we must remember where they come from. We must remember the songs, the stories, the soil. The Guna people are not relics of a lost world. They are living guides for the healing our world desperately needs.
The question is: Will we listen?
