Full episode: meeok.substack.com
For more information visit HoldingCompassionate.space
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This conversation begins with a word that doesn’t get used enough in the plant medicine space: integrity. A daily practice with consequences. Helen opens by asking what I’ve learned about it — in the space, in myself, in the people I’ve watched navigate this work. And what unfolds is both a self-examination and an indictment.
Helen’s own reckoning comes first. The savior complex. The God complex. The years of stuffing it until explosion — when good cop met the final straw, saying something true in a way no one could hear. The medicine didn’t make her virtuous. It made her honest.
“I felt humbled by the experience but I didn’t feel ashamed. It really is an exchange — and it’s a really healthy way of relating to yourself and other people that you carry with you.”
Then we get operational. What integrity actually looks like at Inin Nete: the 14 icaro limit, because after that the quality degrades and you’re getting surgeons running on nothing. Everyone drinking the same medicine from the same batch, because if the healers’ ceremony ends before yours begins, you’re essentially alone. Healers setting their own price without exploitation, because they are the pillar everything else is built around. Celibacy as non-negotiable, because 99% of the problems in this space are sexual. And the danger almost no one talks about — mixed-family healer groups, where the good healers spend the entire ceremony protecting guests from a bad actors instead of those who came for healing. The guests never know. They think they received surgery. They didn’t.
And then Helen asks me what moved the needle for me.
On August 17th, 2016, I walked into the forest for my first master plant dieta. Day one, the plants said: pray for your birth mother. I had barely registered that I was adopted. I did as I was told. When I came out of the forest and checked my phone, there was an email from my adoption agency. My birth mother had walked in the same day I walked into the forest — thirty-six years she surrendered me, to the day. My adoptive mother’s birthday. Exactly a year after I entered the forest, my feet touched Korea for the first time since I was an infant.
“If you have relationships that are based on a falsehood, those are parasitic relationships. They’re parasitic to yourself and they’re parasitic to the other person.”
What followed was not a reunion story. It was a ceremony. And the medicine prepared me, guided me, and helped me integrate that experience as no human could, except perhaps a mother. Helen is awestruck. And then she laughs. That’s the range of this conversation — and of this work.
If this calls something in you, we have retreats this year at Inin Nete Sacred Plant Medicine Healing Center in Peru. Indigenous-owned. Four maestros. Ten guests. Information at HoldingCompassionate.space.
Mee Ok Icaro (Shipibo name Inkanñabhi) is an award-winning writer, plant medicine guide, and co-founder of Inin Nete Sacred Plant Medicine Healing Center. Her work has appeared in notable publications like the LA Times, Boston Globe Magazine, and Michael Pollan’s Trips Worth Telling anthology. She was featured in Gabor Maté’s New York Times bestseller The Myth of Normal and the Netflix docuseries [Un]Well.
She is a Korean adoptee and abuse survivor who was bedridden for three years and in a wheelchair for five with terminal scleroderma. After Western medicine had nothing left to offer, she found her way to the Peruvian Amazon.
A Shipibo family met her broken, almost dead, and became the first people who didn’t exploit her vulnerability – they only sought to help. That was nearly a decade ago.
She’s been in a 10-year apprenticeship with Maestra Maricela and Maestro Francisco, training in the tradition of an onaya (Shipibo healer) in order to become a master facilitator and sacred ally. She has completed dietas with 10 master plants and is currently completing two simultaneous year-long dietas with noya rao, niwe rao, and a magnet.
Now she brings people to the family who saved her life. Mee Ok facilitate retreats at Inin Nete Sacred Healing Center, offers ceremony preparation and integration guidance, and walks with writers in telling their stories.
Mee Ok holds a BA in Philosophy from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and has studied the history of sexuality, medicine, and German at Harvard. To book your discovery call, visit HoldingCompassionate.space.
