Preparing for a Psychedelic Journey
Preparation isn’t about trying to predict what will happen or deciding in advance what your journey should be about. It’s about creating the conditions to meet the experience with a little more awareness, openness and curiosity.
And there are different ways to prepare.
You may want to understand a little more about the psychedelic experience itself, explore your intentions, and begin noticing what is already coming up for you. Or you may benefit from spending less time thinking altogether, practising how to shift your attention out of the constant mental commentary and into your body, your senses and the world around you.
These courses approach preparation from those two different directions.
Psychedelic Preparation Mini-Course is specifically designed for the weeks leading up to a psychedelic journey, while Get Out of Your Head is a broader experiential course in embodiment, sensory awareness and being more present.
Both are self-guided, practical and designed to be experienced rather than simply read.
You can use either course to prepare for a journey with any facilitator. If you later choose to work with me as your facilitator, the amount you’ve paid for either course will be credited toward your journey fee.
Why Psychedelic Preparation Matters
There is a lot of conversation about psychedelic experiences themselves: what people see, what they feel, what they realize, and whether the experience was beautiful, difficult, profound, confusing, or some combination of all of those things.
There is often much less attention paid to what happens before the journey.
Good preparation isn’t about trying to control a psychedelic experience. In fact, trying too hard to determine what should happen can sometimes create its own kind of tension. Preparation is about becoming a little more familiar with yourself before stepping into an experience that may temporarily change the way you perceive yourself, your memories, your emotions and the world around you.
It is also an opportunity to slow down.
Most of us move through everyday life with an enormous amount of mental commentary running in the background. We analyze, categorize, anticipate, explain, judge and make meaning, often without realizing how much of it we’re doing. We develop familiar ways of thinking about ourselves and our lives, and those ways of thinking can become so automatic that we stop noticing them.
Preparing for a psychedelic journey can begin simply by becoming curious about that.
What am I carrying into this experience?
What has been taking up space in my mind lately?
What happens in my body when I think about certain people, memories or parts of my life?
Where do I notice resistance?
What am I hoping for?
And perhaps just as importantly: what am I expecting?
Intention Is Not the Same as Expectation
Setting an intention can be a useful part of psychedelic preparation. An intention gives you a direction to explore without demanding a particular destination.
You might enter a journey wanting to understand a relationship differently, reconnect with yourself, explore a recurring pattern, become curious about something you’ve been avoiding, or simply experience your life from another perspective.
But an intention can quietly turn into an expectation.
I need to understand why this happened.
I need to let this go.
I need to heal this.
I need to have a breakthrough.
Once that happens, it becomes very easy to evaluate the experience against the journey you imagined beforehand.
A psychedelic experience doesn’t necessarily cooperate with our plans.
Sometimes the thing you expected to spend six hours exploring barely appears. Something you haven’t thought about in years may suddenly feel important. You may have an experience that feels enormously significant, or one that seems surprisingly ordinary. You may understand something immediately, or only begin making connections days or weeks later.
Preparation isn’t about writing the script.
It’s about becoming more able to meet the experience that actually happens.
Sometimes the Preparation Starts the Journey
One of the things I find particularly interesting about preparation is that the work can begin well before anyone takes a psychedelic.
When you start deliberately paying attention to your inner experience, things often become easier to notice.
A memory may suddenly come to mind. You may recognize a reaction you’ve had hundreds of times without questioning it. An exercise might bring up unexpected emotion. You might notice resistance to a particular question or realize that something you thought you had completely dealt with still creates a very noticeable response in your body.
That doesn’t mean every reaction contains a hidden message that needs to be decoded.
It means you’re paying attention.
And when something relevant does surface during preparation, the timing can actually be useful. There is space to explore it without the intensity of the psychedelic experience itself. You can sit with it, write about it, talk about it, notice what happens in your body, or simply remain curious about it.
Sometimes preparation changes what you bring into the journey because you’ve already begun engaging with the material beforehand.
Preparing the Mind, Without Staying Stuck in It
A lot of psychedelic preparation naturally involves thinking. You learn about the experience. You consider your intentions. You reflect on your life. You may journal, answer questions and talk with a facilitator.
But there is another kind of preparation that can be equally valuable: practising not turning everything immediately into thought.
We experience the world through our senses before we explain it.
A piece of music can affect us before we decide why we like it. The body can tighten before we’ve consciously identified what bothered us. A smell can bring back a memory before we’ve even recognized the smell. Colour, texture, movement, sound, temperature and physical sensation are constantly providing information that our thinking mind rapidly organizes into a story.
There is nothing wrong with that. It’s part of being human.
But it can be interesting to practise staying with the experience for a little longer before naming it.
What happens if you listen to music without analyzing it?
Draw without trying to make something recognizable?
Walk outside and notice colour, movement and sound without immediately narrating what you’re seeing?
Notice a sensation in your body without rushing to decide what it means?
This is the territory explored in Get Out of Your Head. It isn’t exclusively a psychedelic preparation course. The practices are useful far beyond psychedelics. But learning to move attention between thought, body and sensory experience can be a particularly interesting practice before entering a state in which our usual ways of perceiving and interpreting experience may shift.
Practising a Different Way of Paying Attention
Preparation doesn’t have to be entirely intellectual. In fact, some of the most useful preparation may be experiential.
Both of these courses include exercises designed to help you practise shifting out of your usual ways of thinking and paying attention. Some invite you to become more aware of physical sensation and the signals coming from your body. Others play with perception, attention, creativity and the tendency of the mind to quickly categorize, explain and make sense of what it encounters.
You might experiment with music, movement, drawing, touch, nature or spatial awareness. You may be asked to notice something before naming it, feel something before explaining it, or experience something without immediately deciding what it means.
The goal isn’t to stop thinking. It’s to become a little more flexible in how you use your attention.
Our minds become very good at travelling familiar routes. We interpret new experiences through what we already know, recognize patterns quickly, and construct explanations almost automatically. That’s incredibly useful in everyday life, but it can also make our perspective feel more fixed than it actually is.
These exercises offer opportunities to practise something different: shifting attention, tolerating a little uncertainty, noticing without immediately interpreting, and moving between thought, sensation and direct experience.
In other words, you’re not simply reading about how to prepare for a psychedelic journey. You’re practising.
Your Body Is Part of the Preparation
Psychedelic preparation can become very cerebral very quickly.
What is my intention? What do I want to work on? What does this memory mean? Why do I behave this way?
Those can all be worthwhile questions.
But sometimes another useful question is simply:
What happens in my body when I think about this?
Perhaps your stomach tightens.
Your shoulders rise.
Your breathing changes.
Your jaw clenches.
You feel warmth in your chest.
You suddenly want to move.
Or perhaps you don’t notice anything at all.
There isn’t a correct response.
Body awareness isn’t about learning another system for interpreting yourself. A tight stomach doesn’t automatically mean one thing, and a heavy chest doesn’t necessarily mean another. The practice is noticing first, without immediately deciding what the sensation means.
That distinction matters to me.
Curiosity leaves room for discovery. Interpretation can sometimes close the door too quickly.
You Don’t Need to Become an Expert in Psychedelics
It is entirely possible to over-prepare.
The internet contains an almost endless supply of psychedelic trip reports, neuroscience, podcasts, documentaries, advice, warnings, beautiful stories, frightening stories and very confident people explaining what your experience is going to be like.
You don’t need to consume all of it.
In fact, filling your head with hundreds of other people’s experiences can create expectations of its own.
Preparation should help you feel more oriented, not give you another subject to master.
Understanding some basics can be valuable. Knowing what the day may look like, thinking about practical considerations, understanding the importance of mindset and environment, becoming familiar with your support structure, and considering how you want to approach the experience can all create a useful foundation.
Then you can leave some room for not knowing.
Creating Space for Curiosity
Curiosity is one of the threads running through both of my preparation courses.
Curiosity is different from demanding an answer.
Instead of:
Why am I like this?
you might begin with:
I wonder what happens when this comes up.
Instead of:
I need to get rid of this.
perhaps:
What is this like when I actually allow myself to notice it?
Instead of:
What is my psychedelic journey going to show me?
perhaps:
What am I willing to notice?
That may sound like a subtle difference, but it changes the posture with which we approach an experience.
There is less pressure to produce a revelation and more room to encounter something unexpected.
Practical Preparation Matters Too
Not every aspect of psychedelic preparation needs to be profound.
Some of it is wonderfully ordinary.
Knowing where you’ll be. Understanding approximately how the day will unfold. Thinking about what you’ll eat beforehand. Choosing comfortable clothing. Knowing who will be present. Discussing boundaries and consent. Understanding what support will be available. Making arrangements so that you don’t have responsibilities demanding your attention immediately afterward.
These things may not make for particularly dramatic stories, but they matter.
When practical questions have already been addressed, there are fewer things competing for your attention during the experience.
Preparation can therefore include both the deeply personal and the extremely practical.
There is room for both.
There Is No Perfect Way to Prepare
You don’t need to arrive at a psychedelic experience completely calm, perfectly embodied, free of expectations and carrying a beautifully articulated intention.
That would be another expectation.
You may be excited.
You may be nervous.
You may have absolutely no idea what your intention is.
You may discover during preparation that the thing you thought you wanted to explore isn’t actually the thing occupying most of your attention.
That’s information too.
The purpose of preparation isn’t to turn you into the perfect psychedelic participant. It is to give you some space before the experience to notice where you are, become familiar with a few useful practices, attend to the practical pieces, and begin approaching the journey with curiosity.
Ultimately, you cannot know exactly what a psychedelic experience will be like before you have it.
And perhaps you don’t need to.
You can prepare carefully without trying to control the outcome.
You can have an intention without demanding an answer.
You can learn without filling your head with everyone else’s experiences.
You can notice what is surfacing without deciding immediately what it means.
And you can practise spending a little less time narrating your experience and a little more time actually experiencing it.
That, to me, is what psychedelic preparation is really about.
Psychetopia 