The Idiot’s Guide to Psilocybin Therapy: Grit Your Teeth & Bear It
One of the most important things I do for my clients while we’re preparing for a guided mushroom journey is coaching them how to drop into the experience. Even if they’ve tripped before, apprehension will bubble up to the surface as they begin to feel the medicine enter their bodies and start flicking all those light switches in the cobwebbed corners of their minds. Yep, even seasoned psychonauts aren’t necessarily used to tripping inward on a bed/with an eye-mask/in the middle of the day/next to a guide in the corner of the room.
Consequently, we practice. I send audio tracks of guided meditations, so my clients can rehearse descending into the journey. I ask them about adversity in their daily lives. How do they navigate dissonance and unexpected challenges? What sort of determination and grit have they cultivated that helps them overcome obstacles? Of course, there’s no right answer here—it’s just critically important that we take a moment to recognize a lifetime’s worth of resilience hanging around in our collective toolboxes. As cheesy as it sounds, I remind my clients that the answers to these questions are, indeed, their super powers, and these unique gifts may come in handy in the event of psychedelic turbulence.
Psilocybin Therapy is for Guides Too
As I prepared for my personal psilocybin journey, I naturally decided to raid my emotional trophy case and build a psychedelic toolkit of my own. I immediately landed on my drive and determination—the fearlessness that delivered me from milking cows on a dairy farm in nowhere Massachusetts to performing at festivals in cities as far away as Berlin and Budapest. I privately lauded my meditation practice and my breathwork—both habits that help me embrace dissonance and usher me back to my core self. Finally, out of nowhere, I summoned the former competitive athlete in me, and I was ambushed by a wonderful scrap of self-belief ( a super power, if you will) I’d lost somewhere along the way.
I had forgotten about my mindset before my collegiate and semiprofessional soccer matches. As egotistical as it sounds, that younger version of me boasted a complete and unwavering faith in my ability to outhustle the competition; when I looked across the field, I just knew that I had more heart than anybody that I would be lining up against. This was a Eureka moment for me during my preparation—I felt safe in the knowledge that I could call on that mindset during the journey and outlast the mushrooms. If this would be a battle of resilience, there’s no doubt I would prevail. I was all set to navigate the most intense phases of my journey. Or so I thought…
The Unexpected Pitfalls of Psychedelic Preparation
Relentlessness and resilience. Determination and drive. There are qualities we see celebrated every day from fawning profiles of professional athletes on TV to the origin stories of self-made billionaires on LinkedIn. They oh-so-often make us who we are which is both a blessing and a curse.
When we prioritize grit and determination, we often overlook and underappreciate ourselves as well as the people around us. Relentless drive often comes with blinders and a strict mandate to dismiss anyone and anything that doesn’t serve our ultimate goals. In fact, this hustle culture—along with its myths of self-actualization—often exacerbate our issues and exile unresolved pain and trauma that tends to remerge disguised as pesky conditions like anxiety and depression.
All that said, in the right light, determination is a form of hope that trumpets possibility and refuses despair, and that mindset is THE ideal sidekick for a mushroom journey.
The Right Preparation for a Guided Mushroom Journey
About 5 days before my journey, I realized I’d gotten carried away. I was so lost in recovering the old competitor in me that I’d forgotten the fundamental convictions that compelled me to be a psilocybin guide in the first place. Why was I strategizing ways to defeat the mushrooms? Wasn’t that antithetical to the whole idea of this therapeutic process? What began as a thorough way to prepare for an intense medicine journey somehow devolved into a battle of strength between me and the thing I wanted to cure me.
That said, I wasn’t completely off course; could my experience as a hyper-competitive athlete help me during a mushroom trip? Absolutely, but only in an altogether brighter light. Instead of dismissing the driven and passionate competitor archetype, I leaned into it from a different perspective. I thought of all the sacrifice and dedication—the pump-up tapes, the pre-game meal prep, the scouting trips—that spawned a fierce and unwavering commitment to the fact of preparation itself.
My super power could indeed help me during a mushroom journey. Not only did this new perspective allow me to heed and embrace all the fundamental tips I give my clients, but I reminded myself that dropping into the experience was not a battle but more of a celebration. Because of my rigorous preparation, I would arrive at the psilocybin center with confidence. I would trust my facilitator and the container we created. I would trust the work I did on myself and the intentions I crafted. Most importantly, I would trust the medicine to shepherd me down any path in any universe, and I would not fear whatever surfaced underneath my eye mask.
And that’s what I did. I flipped the script. I wasn’t going to grit and bear it, at all. I wasn’t there to suffer. I was there to heal.