I am a Wiradjuri woman, and for fifteen years I have been honoured to cleanse Country, homes, and the people who live inside them. I was called to this work. I did not choose it the way you choose a practice. It arrived, and I answered and I still have questions, because the learning never ceases..
Every time I work with smoke, something new is revealed. Not because the ceremony changes. Because I do. Because the land does. Because the relationship between practitioner and medicine deepens in ways that cannot be hurried, packaged, or explained in a caption.
That is what ceremony is. Which is why I need to speak plainly about what it is not.
Somewhere between colonisation and Instagram, sacred ceremony became lifestyle branding.
Bundles of white sage. Tied with string. Sold online. Marketed as energy cleansing. Burned casually in apartments thousands of miles from the cultures that protected these medicines for generations.
And an entire industry followed, built on a translation so corrupted it barely resembles the original.
That burning sage removes negative energy.
It sounds ancient. It sounds wise. It is largely a Western invention — ceremony filtered through Christian ideas of purity, then repackaged through New Age concepts of vibration and aura management.
Ceremony became technique. Medicine became product. Knowledge that took generations to steward became a trend that took months to monetise.
We did this. Those of us embedded in spiritual culture, teachers, practitioners, consumers, participated in it. Some knowingly. Most not. But not knowing is no longer a defence available to us.
Here is what was happening at the same time.
Indigenous peoples across North America were legally punished for practising their ceremonies. Children were taken from their families. Languages were suppressed. Spiritual practices were banned under colonial law.
While knowledge holders were silenced, settlers documented those same ceremonies, extracted what interested them, and eventually sold it back to Western audiences as spiritual tools.
The people were criminalised. The symbols were not.
And now white sage sits on shelves in shops that have never considered this history. Burned by people whose societies built the laws that outlawed the very ceremonies it came from.
That is not appreciation. That is historical amnesia wearing the costume of spirituality.
Australia has its own version of this story. And I carry it in my body every time I am asked to explain myself to someone who purchased a smudge kit from a wellness brand.
The land is paying for this.
White sage is being overharvested across California. Wild populations stripped to supply spiritual marketplaces. Plants poached from Indigenous lands. Ecosystems disrupted. Sacred medicine turned into inventory.
You cannot claim spiritual awareness while participating in ecological harm. The two cannot coexist. The land knows the difference even when we do not.
What Western spirituality wanted was the feeling without the cost.
And I understand why.
Ceremony moves something in the nervous system. Breath slows. Attention narrows. Something in the body recognises what the mind cannot name. Humans are ritual-making beings, we always have been. The shift people feel when working with smoke is real.
But that shift comes from presence. From intention. From the willingness to be changed by what you are entering.
Consumer spirituality wanted the shift without the surrender. Burn this. Say this. Cleanse yourself quickly. Move on.
Indigenous worldviews teach something different.
Nothing in nature survives by rejecting parts of itself. Healing is not removal. It is relationship. With the dark, with the ancestor, with the consequence. With the parts of yourself you were taught to exile.
Ceremony asks you to stay inside that. Not to cleanse your way out of it.
I have been inside ceremony long enough to know that I know very little.
Fifteen years. Honoured to cleanse Country. Homes. People at thresholds, birth, death, grief, beginning.
And every time, the practice opens further. Reveals more. Asks more of me.
That is the nature of sacred relationship. It does not plateau. It does not become efficient. It becomes more responsible, more tender, more demanding the longer you are in it.
What I am describing cannot be purchased.
You received something already stolen and told it was a gift.
That is the path of spirituality you chose to take.
But there is a point where not knowing becomes a choice. You are at that point now.
You know where it came from. You know what it cost. You know who paid.
What you do with that is the only question that matters now.
And here is the invitation.
You do not need to abandon ritual. You need to return it to relationship.
Ask where a practice comes from. Who held it. At what cost it was extracted. Whether you have any genuine relationship to it, through lineage, through direct learning from knowledge holders, through land.
Your own ancestry has ways of working with smoke, prayer, and transition. Sacredness is not scarce. It lives in your own unexamined history, waiting.
And if you are called to work with Indigenous ceremony, find the knowledge holders. Learn from them directly. Let it take years. Let it cost you something other than money.
That is what respect looks like. Not guilt. Not performance.
Maturity.
Smoke has been a human language since before any religion claimed it.
But meaning lives in context, not in the smoke itself.
I am still learning what the smoke says.
That is the point.
That is the practice.
And that is something no bundle tied with string will ever be able to sell you.