What to Expect from Your First Preparation Session with Me

Before I facilitate a psilocybin journey with anyone, we go through prep together — a minimum of two sessions, sometimes more, however many it takes. This is about the first one. It’s not the whole process. It’s the door into the process.

I’m going to tell you upfront: I run these sessions nonsequitously. I’m not sitting there reading you a questionnaire. Some of the questions I ask are required by the State of Oregon. Others I’ve developed over almost 1,000 of these conversations. But mostly I’m just trying to get to know you, and I’ll follow wherever you take me. If you show up with a question, we start there. If you show up with a story, we start there. The checklist gets covered either way.

Before anything else: anything you tell me is confidential. You’re under no obligation to answer anything you don’t want to answer. If something I ask feels like I’m pushing you somewhere that doesn’t feel right, tell me, and we stop. This is a non-directive program. I’m not here to tell you what to do, what your experience means, or what you should do with your life afterward. My job is to keep you safe and to serve your best interest in the session itself.

Why are you doing this?

That’s usually where I start. Not “what’s your intention,” not “what do you expect this to fix.” Just: why are you doing this?

I’ve had people answer with a life transition — a job that ended, a marriage of forty years, a total reset point where nothing familiar is holding still anymore.

Whatever you tell me, I go with it. I want to understand what’s happening in your life that brought you here. I might ask about work, relationships, family, decisions you’re sitting on, or something from a long time ago. There’s no standard second question, because it depends entirely on what you just told me. My job at that point is mostly to listen. And I don’t pry into things. Sometimes I’m interested in what you do for a living in detail, otherwise not so much.

The required stuff

Have you done psychedelics before? If yes, I want to know everything — what you took, what happened, was it good, was it bad, was there anything about it that concerned you. Most of the time if you had a deep psychedelic journey I want to understand what you did for integration. Sometimes that conversation becomes an integration session itself. If no, that’s completely fine, I just want to know where we’re starting.

Any alcohol? Cannabis? Any other drugs, prescription or otherwise? I’m not asking to judge you. I’m trying to understand the person I might be sitting with for five, six, seven hours while they’re somewhere I can’t fully follow them.

What medications are you on, how’s your health? If you tell me something I don’t recognize, I’ll say so, and we’ll look it up together right there on the call. I’m not a doctor and I’m not a psychologist nor a psychiatrist. I want to know if anything’s going to matter before we’re in the room.

What triggers you, annoys you, makes you mad? The reason I ask is simple — I don’t want to do some silly thing in the room that sets you off, and I want to know if there’s anything in your history that might come up during the journey that I should be aware of. It’s me learning what you’re carrying into the room, so if something difficult surfaces, I’ve got a little bit of context for it to be prepared.

There are also the “Big 3” questions which OHA requires: have you taken Lithium in the past 30 days, have you ever had an active psychosis diagnosis, are you currently having thoughts of harming yourself or others. Answering yes to any of these three means you CANNOT participate in the Oregon Psilocybin Service program. I ask that last one directly, no softening it, even in the middle of a much bigger conversation about something else entirely.

Prep and integration are the same work

I tell everybody some version of this: prep and integration are the same thing in my opinion. Other facilitators have equally valid viewpoints and I don’t debate this. Many other facilitators have rigorous integration programs. I simply feel I cannot really offer any advice to people as I believe strongly in self determination. In my opinion, the journey itself is just the event sitting in the middle between preparation and integration. I feel it’s a metaphor for life generally — you get ready, you go do the thing, you come back and make sense of it. The “lenses” I suggest now are the same afterward. If something’s useful to you, keep it. If it isn’t, throw it out. This is for you.

Journaling

Most people tell me no, they don’t journal. That’s fine — most people who take psilocybin also don’t journal, and if you ask anywhere what the single most powerful integration tool is, journaling is always at the top of the list. So I suggest starting before the journey, on the theory that if you’re already doing it going in, you’re more likely to keep doing it coming out. Here’s what I suggest: four days, ten minutes a day minimum, by hand, completely free-flowing. Read what you wrote the day before, then just write whatever shows up.

Here’s the thing about the exercise, though — it’s not about the writing. It’s about noticing what’s happening in your head while you write. If the whole ten minutes you’re thinking “this is stupid, I don’t know what to write, why did he ask me to do this” — that’s not you failing the exercise. That’s the exercise. It’s a resistance detector and a lens at the same time. Journaling can be the most powerful tool you have or it can be completely superficial — same as a screwdriver. I don’t carry one around all day. I use it when I need it. Not everything that looks like journaling is doing the job. I’ve had a potential client tell me they journal two hours a day, every day, including what they called “angry journaling” — just listing everything that made them mad. I asked them, is this doing you any good? They said yes. I asked, what good, specifically? They had no answer. That told me something real, and that client decided not to do the journey.

If you decide not to do this suggested exercise, that’s perfectly fine too. Next time we talk I’ll ask how the journaling went, you’ll say you didn’t do it, I’ll ask how come, and we’ll have that conversation instead. Then I suggest how powerful journaling is and how helpful it can be. It is your choice.

Jung and the archetypes

This isn’t psychology and I’m no expert in it — Jung apparently described twelve main archetypes, plus the ego, the animus, the shadow, and honestly I don’t fully understand all of it myself. What I do know is that when people look at their own archetypes, they start looking at themselves symbolically, and symbolism is a language psilocybin speaks fluently. It doesn’t hand you a rational paragraph. Perhaps it will hand you a bucket.

I had a potential client push back hard on this suggested exercise once — “you can’t put me in one of twelve buckets.” And I said, I never put you in a bucket, I asked you to notice which ones you relate to, but it sounds like you’re resisting this, so let’s talk about why. What happens if you’re literally put in a bucket during your journey? What if the bucket’s the size of a thimble and you’re forced into it — do you fight that, or do you make yourself smaller than the thimble and lie down inside it to be comfortable? That whole exchange was metaphorical, on purpose, because that’s exactly what the journey can ask of you. Something strange shows up — an ugly tower, say — and if your instinct is “get me out of here,” you can end up stuck inside it. If your instinct is “huh, that’s a remarkable-looking tower, let me go explore it,” it very often just dissolves. Getting comfortable with the idea that something can mean everything without being literally real — that’s the whole point of this exercise.

Nonviolent Communication

Marshall Rosenberg’s framework — I only found this myself a few years back, and I probably would have rejected it outright if I’d run into it decades earlier. People change how they receive ideas over time. I certainly have.

The short version: there’s a violent system most of us default to — good behavior gets rewarded, bad gets punished, and everybody’s chasing things. Things aren’t just material stuff. A thing is anything you can draw a line around and say this is better than that — the right school, the right neighborhood, the right religion, the right political party. People chase things, never quite get satisfied when they catch them, and go chase the next thing. And people will go to real lengths — coercion, manipulation, pressure, worse — to get the things they want. Rosenberg’s alternative runs entirely on needs. Everyone has them, they’re alive and shifting, and when you can hear a need in someone else and meet it, you both connect to something real. Rage, jealousy, depression — a lot of that, in his framework, is a tragic expression of a need that isn’t getting met. I suggest everyone watch “Speaking Peace” on YouTube.

I’m not asking you to adopt this as a belief system. It’s a lens. The suggested exercise is purely observational — in an ordinary conversation, see if you can hear the need underneath what’s being said, while also noticing what’s happening in you as you try. Don’t try to meet the need. That can backfire. I tell people about the married couple where one partner goes off to “just listen for the need” and the other one says “what’s wrong with you,” and it turns into “you haven’t *** listened to me in twenty years” — because any sudden change in your normal behavior has potentially unintended consequences. Same thing happens after a journey. Somebody quits drinking because their spouse said get help or I’m leaving, they come back sober, and two weeks later the spouse is furious anyway — because sobriety wasn’t the actual need. The need was “stop abusing me for twenty years,” and no amount of quitting drinking retroactively fixes that. That’s when you pick the lens back up and listen for the need instead of the criticism. This can help clients integrate their journey as they navigate the reactions others have to their journey. A side benefit often comes up as the non-violent lens sometimes improves relationships prior to the psilocybin journey, and often afterwards as well.

What might actually happen in there

People ask me this constantly, and I tell them the truth: nothing I say is going to fully describe it, because most of it is indescribable. But I’ll give you the range, so you’ve got something to navigate by instead of nothing.

Five to ten percent of people feel very little or nothing at all. I tell people straight — that would suck, and it’s real, and we’ll talk about why that happens and what to do about it. On the other end, some people get vivid colors, intense sound, complete distortion of time and space — the walls could breathe, the floor could feel like it’s moving, three hours could feel like three days or a tenth of a second could feel like seven hundred thousand years. Other people don’t see any of that and instead get an intense, almost unbearable clarity of consciousness. Emotionally, expect anything — every feeling you’ve had and some you haven’t, sometimes at the same time. You can be laughing and sobbing in the same breath. Physically, some people shake, tremble, even convulse a little, and they may or may not know it’s happening. None of that means anything’s gone wrong. It is perfectly normal.

Most people aren’t worried on the way up. They get worried on the way back down — because as your everyday, get-through-life mind starts reassembling, the first thing it tells you is “warning, warning, you can’t function like this in the real world.” And you may become anxious, because you can’t function like that. If you tell me, I’ll smile and say: I know you can’t function like this right now, and you don’t have to, because you’re on your way back. If you tell me you feel like you’re never coming back — I’ve heard that from hundreds of people. You will come back to “normal” again.

I’ll also tell you the numbers, because I’d rather you have them than not. Roughly one in a hundred to a hundred and fifty journeys ends in a call to emergency services, almost always because someone took more than was right for them. Some short-term anxiety or a few rough nights of sleep afterward is more common and usually settles within days to a few weeks. I’m not telling you this to scare you — for almost everyone I talk to, I don’t see these as real risks in their specific case — but I’d rather you know the edges exist than get blindsided by them later.

Here’s a story that matters for anyone doing deep work: I had a very old client many years ago before the legal business, eighty-six years old, very experienced with psychedelics, seven hours into his journey, and he started going somewhere I hadn’t seen before — deeper and deeper, in a direction that was unusual even for me. So I did something I don’t normally do. I checked in. “Hey, how are you doing, just checking in.” He came to, looked at me, and said, “that was weird, I was checking out.” I told him I was sorry for pulling him back, and he said it was fine, he continued on a bit, and by the time we got to integration he told me he’d basically been dying in there, and it was peaceful.

What I actually do while you’re in it

Light touch. This is your journey, not mine. I’m not interrupting because I’ve decided we need a profound conversation. If you need practical help, I’m there. If you’re struggling, I’m there. If reality needs reintroducing — a reminder you’ll see your family again, that what feels like a heart attack usually isn’t one — I’m there for that too. But I’m not directing your experience, and that starts in prep, not in the room.

Are we a good fit?

You’re evaluating me too, the whole time. You’re about to spend five, six, seven hours with me while you’re somewhere altered and vulnerable, and you should have a real read on who I am before you agree to that. If something about how I run things makes you more anxious instead of less, that’s worth listening to. It might mean I’m not the right facilitator for you, and that’s a completely legitimate outcome of this process. I’d rather you figure that out in prep than discover it mid-journey.

This is one session, not the whole process

Before we finish, I’ll ask if this has been helpful and if there’s anything else on your mind. Then we’ll set up the next call — ideally more than four days out, so you’ve actually got time to try the journaling before we talk again.

I want to be straight about what this first session was and wasn’t. It wasn’t the whole prep process. It was the door into it. I’ve covered the required questions, suggested you a few tools, and given you a sense of the range of what might happen in the room — but I don’t know yet what any of that is going to turn into for you, and neither do you. That’s what the rest of prep is for.

The second session runs differently, because I don’t need to introduce the frameworks again. We talk about what happened as you thought about prep. Did you journal. What did you notice. What came up around the archetypes. Did you catch yourself listening differently in a conversation since we last talked. What questions have you got now that you didn’t have before. Depending on what surfaces, we might need a third session, or a fourth. I don’t put a number on it in advance. We keep meeting until we’re both actually ready to walk into that room together, not just scheduled to.

None of this is about teaching you the “right” way to have a psilocybin experience. I don’t know what experience you’re going to have — nobody does, going in. The first session’s job is narrower than that: get to know each other, find what might matter once you’re in the room, hand you a few ways to watch your own mind before you need them, and answer whatever you’ve got.

Some people are overwhelmed at the end of the first session, others become wide eyed, and 99% of people eagerly look forward to the next preparation session because the hardest parts have been covered: why are you doing this and how will we keep it safe.

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