I get asked this question more than almost any other. Which training program should I do? Is this one legit? Is that one worth the money? And underneath nearly every version of it is a second question nobody says out loud: if I finish this program, what am I actually allowed to call myself?
I want to answer both, plainly, because the field’s silence on this exact point is doing real damage.
Is [a given] certification program legitimate, or is it a cash grab?
Let’s start with the word “legitimate” itself. When most people ask whether a program is legitimate, what they’re really asking is something more specific: will this let me do the work legally, with little to no risk? And I hate to be the one to tell you, but, if legitimate means legal, that kind of certainty only exists in Oregon or Colorado. Everywhere else, no certificate can hand it to you, no matter what it costs or promises.
Outside of legality, a legitimate program has you sit with the medicine yourself, not just study it. It is transparent about what its credential does and doesn’t authorize, and it never lets graduates borrow language, like “therapist,” that belongs to a licensed profession. Vagueness on any of those points is your answer.
Three tests, and you can run any program you’re considering through all three in a single phone call. Let’s start with the first one, because it’s the one I’d boil an entire evaluation down to if I only got to keep one criterion. Make sure the training program has you sit with the medicine. Not just studying it conceptually. Not reviewing demo footage and taking notes on what could happen in a room. Actually sitting with it and experiencing the state yourself.
There are too many purely didactic, purely Zoom-based trainings in this space right now. And teaching someone to guide a medicine session without ever having experienced the medicine themselves is like teaching someone to swim without ever getting them in the water. Embodied experience isn’t a bonus feature in this work. It’s the foundation everything else sits on. A program that skips it hasn’t just cut a corner. It’s produced a facilitator who has never felt, from the inside, what they’re about to hold for someone else.
So what actually makes it a cash grab, then?
Not the price. This is where people get it backwards. A cash grab isn’t a number on an invoice, a $2,000 program can be one, and a $20,000 program can be worth every dollar. What tells you is the ratio: what you hand over, against what you actually walk away with.
A real training is mostly made of expensive, unscalable things. Your own sits with the medicine. Supervised practice, with feedback. Mentorship from someone who’s actually held rooms. Those cost money because they cost someone’s time.
A cash grab is made of cheap things dressed as valuable ones. Pre-recorded lectures. A PDF and a badge. And usually, promises that you’ll build a six-figure practice, “certified in a weekend,” and a credential quietly implying more authority than it can legally give you.
The honest question to ask isn’t “can I afford this?” It’s “am I being sold a skill, or a dream?” One of those you take into a room with a real human being. The other you take into debt.
Does it matter where the medicine, and the methods, come from?
Yes. Deeply. And it’s the test almost no one thinks to run.
These medicines, and the ways of working with them, did not originate in a curriculum. They come from lineages (largely Indigenous and spiritual) that carried this knowledge, often at real cost, through generations when doing so was criminalized or worse. A legitimate program knows that, and says it out loud. It’s clear about which traditions it’s drawing from, it doesn’t repackage borrowed practices as its own clever invention, and where it can, it gives something back to the communities that kept this alive. Reciprocity, not just extraction.
This isn’t about performing a land acknowledgment and moving on. It’s about coherence. A program asking you to be honest about your title, your scope, your training… while staying vague about where its own methods came from… is failing the very standard it’s charging you to learn.
If they can’t tell you where the work comes from, that’s the same vagueness we’ve been circling this whole time. Just pointed at a different question. And by now you know what vagueness means.
