Walk the other way

I met Phillip Scott 15 years ago; he was my teacher in a class on Indigenous Medicine at a Bay Area graduate school. I was in a vulnerable state, as I was grieving the loss of a relationship and feeling quite lost. I began attending his sweat lodges in Novato and had some powerful experiences. 

He helped me at first, but it became clearer over time that he had certain expectations around ceremony and if someone stepped out of line in any way or showed up late, he would berate and belittle the person in front of the group. 

When I decided to go on a Hanbleceya (vision quest) with him and I began preparing, he put increasing pressure on me to "see your commitment through" and would become aggressive if he sensed that I had any priority greater than the preparation process. He would belittle other medicine paths like working with plant medicines because he perceived it as a threat to his way. 

On the Hanbleceya, he regularly pressured us to give him donations, on multiple occasions. During the vision quest, I was in a very open and porous state through three nights of no food and water and freezing cold. When we came down from "the hill" he had us go into a sweat lodge for two hours and we were completely dehydrated and were nearly passing out. 

After we returned to his house, he made demeaning remarks about me in front of the group, after I made a call to friend following the harrowing ordeal. I decided that day to leave and never work with him again. We had some email exchange in which I followed up with him to see if we could reach some sort of mutually respectful agreement to end the relationship and he launched into a venomous, scathing, and highly defensive diatribe that excluded any sign of respect for my personhood. 

The level of animosity and vehemence in his words was surprising to me, even after witnessing him do this to others, as I had followed all his advice and rules and showed up on time to his events. I fortunately had a friend who had also been in the class with me and who also was able to see through this little man who was obsessed with power and control and so we were able to validate each others' impressions and laugh at him together. 

Still, there was a darkness to those days in which I put my trust in someone whom I thought was an authentic healer and who turned out to be a con man. It's hard to think of anything good that came out of being his student, other than meeting a fellow classmate who became a dear friend. This friend was the opposite of Phillip Scott - he was soft, gentle, refined, light-hearted, funny, and didn't take himself too seriously. Phillip was the opposite, overly controlling, judgmental, lacking in compassion, manipulative, hard, crude, in a name, "a bully," I would highly encourage anyone thinking to work with this person to walk the other way. 

He comes off as "macho" and some people like that or are intimidated by that, but I think there is some more serious sociopathy in the picture with this man. Ironically, as he bullied people right and left, he would, almost in the same breath, instead of taking responsibility, blame the "patriarchy" and "colonial ways." Maybe in another message I will share his email that he wrote to me after the Hanbleceya - it is quite scary actually.