inside a guided psilocybin journey: How I support deep healing and surrender

Jul 11

For the past two years, I’ve worked as an above-ground psychedelic guide, facilitating above-ground psilocybin sessions in a structured and therapeutic context. In total, I have nearly a decade of experience in psychedelic facilitation and peer support. I’ve supported hundreds of personal journeys, accumulated thousands of hours of direct facilitation, and offered psychedelic peer support at festivals for over ten years.

What I’ll describe here reflects what I’ve found most powerful for myself and for the many people I’ve had the honor to support. Each journey is unique, but there are some common phases, principles, and practices that shape how I guide.

How Psilocybin Promotes Healing

Much of what ails us lives beneath our conscious awareness. Deep beliefs, unresolved feelings, early memories—they continue to shape our behaviors, relationships, and emotional lives even when we can’t access them directly. Psilocybin mushrooms are remarkably effective at loosening this boundary between the conscious and subconscious. It opens the aperture between these worlds. With the right support, it can allow hidden material to rise into awareness, where it can finally be witnessed and worked with.

However, those hidden parts of us are often buried for a reason. At the time they were formed, it wasn’t safe to feel or express what was happening. So our minds developed protective mechanisms—what we might call "protector parts"—to keep us safe by keeping those experiences out of reach.

These protector parts are not enemies. They’re trying to help. But when psychedelics blow open the doors of perception too quickly or too forcefully, those protectors may panic and clamp down even harder. This is why a purely pharmacological approach—taking high doses of mushrooms and pushing for a breakthrough—can often backfire, leaving people overwhelmed and unable to integrate what arose. It makes the whole thing both overly intense and very transient.

The key is to learn how to surrender, with the cooperation of these protective parts. That’s not something the mushrooms do for you. It’s a skill. And it’s something I help you develop in the weeks or months leading up to your journey and throughout the experience itself.

The Role of the Guide: Support for Surrender

My primary job as a guide is to help you safely and skillfully surrender to the experience—to allow the medicine to take you where you need to go, and to support you in meeting what arises with courage and compassion.

That looks different for everyone. Sometimes I’m actively guiding the client from the beginning to the end - every minute. Other times I’m largely silent, creating a strong energetic container while you navigate the terrain yourself.

Knowing what a client needs and when comes from training, extensive experience, a close connection to the client, and a deep understanding of the psychedelic landscape. This is the art of psychedelic facilitation.

Every psilocybin journey is different. But generally, the experience follows several recognizable phases. Here’s what each phase looks like, and how I might support you through it:

Phase One: Setting the Container

This is the initial period where we arrive together in the space. We talk through intentions, review ground rules, and help you orient to the space and my presence. If it resonates with you, we may invite in ceremony—offering intentions to the mushrooms, calling in the directions, or speaking prayers.

This creates a felt sense of safety and sacredness—a clear boundary around the experience that signals to your system that it’s okay to let go.

Phase Two: Ingestion to Initial Onset

Once you take the medicine, I’ll invite you to lay down, close your eyes, and begin connecting with your breath and body. We typically engage with a body scan or breathing practice to help you relax into the unknown.

My focus here is on grounding—helping you stay anchored in your body and connected to your intention. This is a time when many people feel nervous, and that anxiety can ripple into the rest of the journey.

Phase Three: The Come-Up

As the mushrooms begin to take effect, sensations often arise first—tingling, tension, heat, movement. Emotions may emerge: laughter, fear, grief, joy. Thoughts may become more intrusive or surreal.

The key here is breathing and letting go. Don’t analyze. Don’t try to control. Let go of the need to understand and simply stay with what you feel.

If you’re struggling to let go, I may offer support:

Parts work: dialoguing with protective parts to build trust
Somatic interventions: helping you track and stay with body sensations
Mindfulness: guiding you to let thoughts and sensations come and go without hooking into them
Movement or sound: shaking, humming, crying, drumming, or simply letting your body do what it needs

The goal is to help your protectors feel safe enough to soften, not to force them aside.

Phase Four: The peak

When the defenses let go, something shifts. Often this is a moment of deep emotional release, powerful imagery, or contact with something that feels sacred. Some people meet inner children, ancestors, or spirit guides. Others relive formative memories or experience profound states of unity. It looks different for everyone in every journey.

Once you’ve fully surrendered, I often step back. If you’re still struggling, I stay close, offering reassurance and guidance to keep you in the experience without reverting to thinking or analysis.

Phase Five: The Plateau

Here the experience levels off. It’s no longer building, but it hasn’t begun to decline. This is often the phase where deep insights or "downloads" arrive. I usually hold a quiet presence here unless you need support. I’ll be tracking your journey silently - feeling your energy and sensing where you are based on my extensive experience journeying myself. Verbally intervening too much can pull you out of the experience.

Phase Six: The Come-Down

As the intensity fades, there is a strong pull to start interpreting and unpacking. But often this is too soon. The aperture is still open, and the best use of this time is continued presence with whatever is still moving through you.

This is often a time when the conscious mind comes back strongly online, but the deeper material is still accessible. If there’s work you’ve prepared for—such as contacting a part carrying a specific trauma—this can be a powerful time to engage it gently.

Otherwise, I help you stay in your body and out of analysis. Art-making, journaling, movement, or meditation may be supportive here.

Phase Seven: The Next Day

Even once the medicine feels like it’s worn off, you are still in the journey. The aperture is still more open than usual. My role now shifts to helping you keep the channel open through the journey skills we developed in preparation.

This is where insight becomes transformation—where you practice staying in touch with your inner world, not because the mushrooms are pushing you to, but because you now have the capacity to choose it.

Phase Eight: The Integration

In the weeks and months following your journey, the work is still very much ongoing. Usually I’ll meet with you one or more times during this period to support your transition into daily waking life.

Finally, it is time to interpret and analyze your experience - only once we’ve squeezed every last bit out of that critical window of increased access. Connecting your psychedelic experience to the events of your life, the stories about your past, and your intentions for the journey can help you integrate your journey into your life outside of it.

Importantly, we will also discuss daily practices which can keep you in touch with yourself and help you continue your healing process. The magic of the medicine will inevitably begin to fade, but your daily practices will invariably get more powerful. This is really the key to turning a powerful psychedelic experience into lasting change.

Final Thoughts

There’s no one right way to journey. But in my experience—and in the hundreds of journeys I’ve guided and personally taken—the most healing happens when we learn to surrender to the medicine with the cooperation of our protective parts. That surrender is a practice. A discipline. A relational skill.

My job is to teach you that skill, tailor the support to your nervous system, and walk with you every step of the way.

If you're curious to learn more about how to prepare for this kind of work, check out my post on Journeywork Skills. And if you feel the call to deepen into this kind of experience, I’d be honored to guide you.