My Epic Story
TIMELINE
Where to begin? I was well on my way in life—in my late 30s—before I received a clear calling to the Wixarika healing path. Looking back, I do see how a foreshadowing of this calling that came at a much earlier stage, when I was still a boy.

I was raised in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, and born into a Jewish family. When I look at pictures from my parent’s wedding in 1957, they show a smiling, beautiful couple with a Vogue-like glamor. But that ‘picture-perfect’ beginning soon gave way to conflict.
I was born in 1958, and my sister Karen followed a year and a half later. We shared a bedroom together in our modest apartment, and I can remember the two of us lying awake at night as we listened to my parents shouting at each other from the living room. From an early age, home did not feel safe.

To escape, there was the world of my maternal Grandfather–Charles ‘Charlie’ Sugerman. Short, stocky, and with jet-black hair and a ruddy complexion, he was generally quiet. But when he spoke, his voice boomed. Charlie owned a successful building and garden supply business, but his real passion was horses.

From an early age, I spent Saturdays working in the warehouse of Charlie’s business and then Sundays riding horses with him.
Well, for a while at least, I was on a pony that would trot alongside his magnificent Tennessee Walker, ‘King!’
In those early days, Charlie boarded horses at a farm run by a kind, elderly couple named Mr. and Mrs. Rivers.
When I was about twelve, Charlie decided to buy a 66-acre farm of his own and quickly turned it into a full-fledged operation that included cattle, chickens, pigs (that side of the family was the least likely to keep kosher!), and a large field that alternated between hay, oats, and corn. This was quite an endeavor for a man in his 60s to take on!


and me at my Bar Mitzvah
Whereas I got sweaty, dirty work (in the warehouse) and horses from my maternal Grandfather, from the other side of the family I got… religion! While my parents certainly identified as being Jewish, they were not particularly religious. But my paternal Grandfather Sam, was particularly devout. And truth be told, even Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Rosie on the other side expected the grandchildren to have at least some religious education. And so, even as I was working in the warehouse and being introduced to farm life, I began to attend Hebrew School at night and on the weekends. In the Jewish tradition, a Bar (male) or Bat (female) Mitzvah includes a selected reading from the Torah in front of the whole congregation, and the ritual is considered an initiation into adulthood. But when I had my Bar Mitzvah on September 4, 1971, I was short, pudgy, and still looked decidedly like a kid! But that was about to change.
In the Jewish tradition, a Bar (male) or Bat (female) Mitzvah includes a selected reading from the Torah in front of the whole congregation and the ritual is considered an initiation into adulthood. But when I had my Bar Mitzvah on September 4, 1971, I was short, pudgy, and still looked decidedly like a kid! But that was about to change.
Three weeks to the day after my Bar Mitzvah, I was with Grandpa Charlie on his farm outside of Burton, Ohio. With the summer ending, it was time to cut and bale the alfalfa hay growing in the field. By this time, I had already mastered driving a full-sized Ford tractor, but Kenny, a cheery young farmhand, did the actual work.
That particular morning, Kenny was driving the tractor, and I was behind him, standing on part of the hitch and holding on to the fenders. I can still remember the sweet smell of the alfalfa. It was thick and moist—perhaps from the night’s dew or a rain shower the previous day. The long, straight-cutting blade pulled behind the tractor would get clogged with clumps of alfalfa from time to time. Every now and then, Kenny would shut off the cutters, and I’d jump off the tractor to clean away the thick, green clumps.

At one point, as I was climbing back on the tractor, Kenny turned on the power take-off a little too soon. My work bootlace was near the whirling universal joint, and in an instant, my left lower leg got drawn against the spinning metal shaft. What happened next was dream-like. I felt my toes vibrating. I yelled to Kenny immediately, and he shut off the power take-off, jumped out of the seat, and came to the back of the tractor. He lifted me into his arms, and I remember that my. Sears steel-toe reinforced work boot just dropped away. To this day, I don’t know if I actually saw the wound—an eight-inch laceration running from halfway down my leg to below my ankle—or if I later just imagined it. Either way, it was pretty shocking!
Kenny carried me out of the field and towards the barn. Charlie saw us coming, and I can remember him pulling at his hair and shouting, “You killed my grandson! You killed my grandson!” An ambulance came—a converted late 50’s station wagon with big windows. As I was loaded into the ambulance to be sent to the closest country emergency room, I knew I was injured pretty badly. In my 13-year-old mind, and given Charlie’s reaction to seeing me, it seemed possible that I might survive. And yet, I recall feeling a strange sense of peace that I would somehow be okay, no matter what the actual outcome.
Of course, I did survive. I had lost a lot of blood, and the gaping wound would require some plastic surgery to repair and also a cast because of a fracture to the bone. I spent a full month in the hospital recovering. But thanks to the power of modern allopathic medicine—which certainly has its place—I was able to recover. I was lucky to be alive and still have my left foot. The leg would always be a bit weaker, and the area of the wound continued to feel tender a half-century later. But that didn’t stop me from becoming a distance runner like my father, and less than ten years after the accident, I went on to successfully complete the New York City Marathon.
Only much later did I discover that in many traditions, initiation for males can include a kind of ‘wounding’ or an encounter with one’s mortality. My Bar Mitzvah had been a rather sanitized, suburban initiation with some aspects of the old ways. Something closer to an ‘old school’ initiation happened three weeks later on the farm. Even at the time, I knew this was an important turning point in my life. But only many years later did I begin to see what it might portend.

Living in a fairly typical suburban world outside of Cleveland, Ohio, in the early 1970s, there was no one to help me make sense of this experience that ‘knocked me off my footing.’ And so, I went back to navigating through life like so many others around me did—not looking at the deeper currents moving me below the surface. My parents separated within a year or so after the accident and eventually went through an ugly divorce. I kept doing all of the things I was supposed to do: I graduated from high school and dreamt of being some kind of professional like others on my father’s side of the family. But it began to feel like I was sleepwalking through life. I was quiet and held a lot in. At one point in high school, I started taking medications for anxiety and depression.

A sense of home eluded me. I was happy to go away to college, and after graduation, I did a stint in Washington, D.C., as a Congressional staffer. But I was restless, and after three years working on Capitol Hill, I went on to the Peace Corps (for only a year) and then to live with my bohemian artist aunt Andrée in Berkeley, California. After a few years, I enrolled in a new graduate program in international relations at UC San Diego. I kept moving. I was looking for something but didn’t know exactly what. At least in graduate school, I met Jessica, who would become my wife and a very loving, supportive companion for the next chapter in my life!
Eventually, Jessica and I both became doctoral students in the Education program at UC Santa Barbara. If you are going to be a student anywhere, Santa Barbara is hard to beat: Having a temperate, Mediterranean-like climate, the campus is right on the Pacific Ocean, with the beautiful range of the Santa Ynez Mountains a few miles in the opposite direction. For undergraduate students, the school is notorious for its hard-partying and being an ideal place for surfers. For graduate students… well, there is the beauty of a setting that you may only notice on quick jaunts between classes and the library!
Another important turning point at this time: To compensate for the intense intellectual focus of our graduate work, Jessica suggested that we take up meditation. Santa Barbara had a local school teaching Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation. Jessica and I signed up for the course and got our individual mantras. At the very first sitting, I closed my eyes and silently focused on my mantra, and it felt like my awareness almost immediately dropped into what felt like a very deep well.
Our meditation practice literally opened us to a whole new reality or realities. Partially to escape the drudgery of graduate school, we soon embraced a whole range of spiritual offerings that were part of the New Age smorgasbord culture of California in the 1990s: channeling, yoga, Qigong, and Council Circle. During this giddy time of exploration, we read about a man named Eliot Cowan and Plant Spirit Medicine. Just ‘coincidentally’ (and as I later came to appreciate, oftentimes we are guided by such unlikely coincidences or ‘synchronicites’), Eliot had recently moved to Santa Barbara after living in Mexico for a few years.

Reading the local paper one day, I discovered that Eliot was offering a free public talk. Jessica and I decided to go and hear directly from this odd fellow who purported to communicate with the spirits of plants!
Arriving at the local environmental center where he would be speaking, I imagined we would meet some kind of hip, exotic-looking fellow with a ponytail and perhaps a tattoo or two. I mean, this was Southern California after all! But instead, Eliot was balding, with an owlish look behind his spectacles and a very soft-spoken manner. There were no discernible tattoos. As I joked later, he could have been a shoe store salesman! But when Eliot spoke, his modest appearance gave way to something else. The voice was still soft, and the words were delivered in an unhurried manner. But the meaning was so powerful—like arrows to the heart. talked about the fundamental imbalance in our modern way of life and contrasted this with the wisdom of older, indigenous traditions. Something that had been asleep in me began to wake up. I immediately signed up for Plant Spirit Medicine treatments with Eliot, and Jessica soon followed.
At this stage, my biggest complaints were insomnia and occasional bouts of depression. After a year or so of Plant Spirit Medicine treatments, I could not tell if these conditions were improving. But something more subtle was happening. I looked forward to my appointments with Eliot because I felt like I was being seen and held at a level that I had never experienced before. I decided to study Plant Spirit Medicine myself. Once I made this commitment, and before the class had even begun, I began having a series of strange and powerful dreams about life, death, and healing. Eliot would often ask me about anything unusual happening in ‘the dream state.’ Now I felt like I had an epic tale to tell!

On that appointed day after the strange dreams, I arrived at Eliot’s house, as he was still seeing clients there since his recent move from Mexico. At the start of our session, I excitedly began to talk about my dreams. But no sooner had I started that, Eliot interrupted me. He said, “I have a friend visiting from Mexico who I think would also be interested in your dreams. Do you mind if he joins us? ” I said this would be fine.
At this point, I expected to see a Mexicano. But instead, in walked a smiling, lanky ‘with a Southern accent—a man named David Wiley. I resumed my narration about the dreams. When I finished, Eliot and David just looked at each other and smiled.
Particularly in those days, Eliot was a man of few words. He seemed to save them up for times when he had to say something that really mattered. At this point, all he would say was that my dreams showed a calling to follow him as an apprentice and become a mara’kame, or healer, and ritual leader in the Huichol tradition. It would take months to get the most basic idea of what this meant: A life-long commitment to the path begins with an initial series of six annual pilgrimages to sacred sites, each preceded by a month of special fasting. If all that didn’t sound strange enough, it was especially disturbing to be told (eventually) that if I didn’t follow this special calling, I might find myself in very deep trouble!
Later, I would appreciate Eliot’s deliberateness and patience. He only told me as much as I needed to know at any given time. The idea of a “calling” to the Wixárika path for this Jewish boy raised in the suburbs of Cleveland did not really make sense—with ‘sense’ being something the mind demands. But I was to learn that beyond our minds is another amazing capacity called ‘heart’—which connects us to each other, the world, and the Great Mystery beyond. As an initiated mara’akame, Eliot could ‘see’ that my heart was calling for me to follow in his footsteps. My ‘knowing’ (versus the sense or understanding of the mind) of what that entails continues to unfold to this day—over 25 years later!
I would soon discover that David Wiley was Eliot’s first apprentice on the Huichol path and that the former had the gift of being an Axihuatakame (Wiráxika for a ‘god speaker man’) who could bring forth the voice of the Divine expression of Fire. That Expression is known as Tatewarí to the Huichols (literally, Our Grandfather Fire). David has his own remarkable story about encountering Grandfather while working as a trade consultant in Mexico. I would also learn that with David’s help, Tatewarí was giving Eliot guidance on Plant Spirit Medicine and the recruitment of new apprentices for the Huichol path. Later, He would point to an even bigger project called Sacred Fire. This would be an international effort to bring more heart, connection, and wisdom to the modern world.

Eventually, both Jessica and I studied Plant Spirit Medicine. Like many of Eliot’s students in various locations around the world (currently including locations around the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Colombia, Ireland, the U.K., and Australia), we began having regular gatherings around the fire. This would become a core offering of Sacred Fire, and in 2005, Jessica and I received formal training and initiation to become Firekeepers.
Over the years, I would become a co-Executive Director and later Executive Director of Sacred Fire. In 2004, I completed six years of pilgrimage to sacred sites in Mexico, and I was initiated as a ‘mara’akame.

It was 30 years ago that I first heard about Eliot Cowan. A couple of years later, I met David and discovered my calling. Since then, Grandfather Fire’s wisdom and guidance have been a blessing to Jessica and me. As Firekeepers, we have gathered people around the fire in Santa Barbara and Sebastopol, California, and then in Bend, Oregon. For the past eight years, we have been hosting fires in Carrollton, Georgia—where David and his wife Sherry also live. As I do Grandfather’s work, I have been blessed to travel across the U.S. and also to locations in Mexico, Canada, and the U.K. Wherever I am, if I am sitting by the fire, I feel like I am ‘home.’ I am honored to be offering healing and traditional wisdom to people worldwide at a time of great challenge.
Sadly, Eliot Cowan passed away in early 2022. Over the years, he became not only a mentor and teacher but also a dear friend. We shared many adventures together, and that included times of great joy, laughter, and learning. Eliot’s legacy lives in his many Plant Spirit Medicine students and clients, in those of us—like David—who follow him on the Wiraxika path and, in turn, our clients.
As I follow Eliot, David, and the generations of Wiraxika elders that precede them, I feel blessed to be offering healing and traditional wisdom to people at a time of great challenge. By the grace of Tatewarí and the other gods, I have seen people’s lives transformed. In the process, I see a new way—actually, a very old way—forward for us individually and collectively.
From time to time, I feel some echoes of the old restlessness. In the service of Tatewarí, I have had the opportunity to support healing and rituals for people across the U.S. and also in locations in Mexico, Canada, and the U.K. But now, wherever I go, if I am sitting by the fire, I feel like I am finally ‘home.’ I feel fortunate to know my place in the world and to have a calling to help other people find their ‘place’ as they receive the kind of healing that only a rich, time-tested tradition can provide.

Playing My Part In This Effort Is My Greatest Joy.
My Philosophy of Life
My greatest aim is to use the gifts I’ve been given to help others. It is important to me to do this with the utmost integrity—in a way that promotes the health and well-being of my clients. I know I have my part to play in this process, but I recognize that ultimately, whatever benefit or healing is achieved is a gift from Divine. I recognize that I must do my part without attachment, and this means that no healer or modality will be effective for all people in all situations. That said, I will always do my best to support the deepest healing for those who seek my help.


My Story & Walk through life
My mission is to humbly serve Divine by offering deep healing and wisdom to those who seek my help and to do so with compassion, integrity and respect.
MY VISION
I am part of creating a future wherein people combine the best of traditional healing with modern allopathic medicine in order to live healthier, more balanced lived in which they feel deep connection to one another (community), nature and Divine (the Great Mystery).
2023
Sacred Fire Speaker
Weaving together a long standing interest in nature, bringing people together, and healing in his work for Sacred Fire.
2017-2023
Sacred Fire Executive Director
Overseeing the work of an international organization that is bringing more heart and connection into the world.
Jun 2016
Sacred Fire Initiated Firekeeper
Creating ritually grounded space for people of all spiritual orientations to share, connect, and discover the ancient wisdom of the heart.
SEP 2004
Initiated Mara’akame – Healer & Ritual Leader in the Huichol Tradition
I provide traditional healing to support people in body, mind, and spirit.
2000
Plant Spirit Medicine Practitioner
Ancient shamanic practice compelled the healer to first make contact with the spirit of the plant to ask for its help before administering the herbal cure.
1999
First Regular Fire Gatherings in Santa Barbara, California.
1996
Introduction to Eliot Cowan & Plant Spirit Medicine.
1989
First Wixrárika pilgrimage
To México as a mara’akame apprentice.
1991-1989
UC Santa Barbara Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Higher Education / Higher Education Administration – Dissertation based upon a sociolinguistic analysis of a culturally diverse, interdisciplinary health-care team.
1987-90
UC San Diego Master’s Degree
International Relations & Affairs with a regional specialization in Latin America. Course work included finance, statistics, macro & micro-economics & accounting.
1977-81
Colgate University Bachelors Degree
Double-majored in English literature and Philosophy. Received Honors in Philosophy.
1971
Bar Mitzvah
Farm Accident.
1958
Born
In Chicago, Illinois, USA


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