Essential Skills for Psychedelic Journeys
Embarking on a psychedelic journey can be a profound and transformative experience, offering insights into the depths of your consciousness and your interconnectedness to all of existence.
However, navigating these realms skillfully requires more than just ingesting a substance. A cultivated capacity to deeply surrender to the process, and hold whatever arises with acceptance and compassion, will dramatically increase both the profundity of these experiences and the potential for them to radically change your life.
Think of these as ‘journeywork’ skills - cultivated capacities which can uplevel your ability to embark on meaningful psychedelic journeys.
1) Breathwork: Soothing the Vagus Nerve
The first and absolutely most important journeywork skill is learning how to utilize your breath. Breathing is unusual physiologically because our bodies do it for us automatically, but we are also able to voluntarily control our breathing. This allows for a two-way connection through which our minds can talk directly to our body.
Deep breaths in, followed by long slow breaths out, communicates to our body that we are not in danger. If there was something we really needed to run from or fight, we wouldn’t be breathing that way. Deeply relaxing your muscles at the bottom of the out-breath also helps to send this message and allow you to relax into whatever is coming up.
If you continue to breathe, and breathe deeply, you can move through any inner experience with more grace and ease. When on a psychedelic journey, being able to keep with your breath is an absolute game-changer.
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Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and take 3 normal breaths. Then breathe in deeply for a count of 4, hold it briefly, and breathe out slowly, through pursed lips, for a count of 6. The count doesn’t actually matter, so long as your out-breath is longer than your in-breath. Repeat this deep breathing 5 times. Watch sensations in your body and simply notice how they change.
2) Mindfulness: Cultivating Presence and Acceptance
Breathing through an experience is one thing, but if you want to deeply understand and resolve whatever is coming up, what’s crucial is the attitude you hold towards the experience. Staying with what’s happening, and finding deep acceptance for the fact that it’s happening, is key to allowing that process to unfold and resolve with minimal resistance.
Mindfulness is the practice of non-judgmental awareness of the present moment, including thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations. It is a skill that can be cultivated over time and one I cannot recommend highly enough. There are many ways to cultivate mindfulness - it does not have to be through sitting and watching your breath. Check out this blog post to get a few ideas of how you might incorporate mindfulness more creatively.
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Find a comfortable position and close your eyes (or come to a soft gaze). Begin by taking several deep breaths. Feel your body and the points of contact with the earth beneath you. As you breathe, scan your body and notice any sensations you find - whether it's warmth, coolness, tension, or relaxation. Notice when thoughts arise about this sensation.
Once you’ve noticed the thought, briefly say “judgment” to yourself in your head and redirect your attention back to the sensation. You can do the same thing when you notice your mind wandering to the past or the future (simply substitute ‘past’ or ‘future’).
It is important to try to be kind to yourself as you redirect your attention. Having thoughts doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong - you are simply practicing bringing yourself back to the present.
Practice this for 5 minutes per day, then progress to 10 minutes, and so on.
3) Somatic Awareness: Listening to the Body
Our culture has a tendency to teach that our minds and bodies are separate. It discounts the relevance of most bodily sensations and feelings as something to be controlled by the mind. This results in a sort of splitting in which we become hostile to and isolated from our bodies. However, the reality is that so much of our mental and emotional health requires us to be integrated with our bodies.
As the psychedelic journey begins, people often experience physical sensations begin to emerge. Whether it’s a lump in your throat, or a tightness in your chest, or even nausea - they all have an underlying psychological source, whether it be uncomfortable emotions, difficult memories, or core beliefs being challenged. We can find out what these sensations have to tell us by cultivating our capacity to simply watch them with as much compassion as we can muster.
Just like mindfulness, somatic awareness is a capacity you can cultivate over time. I would recommend you start just by learning to pay attention to your body and understand its cues.
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Print out a list of basic emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Love, Hate, Guilt, Shame, Boredom.
Take a moment a few times a day (set a reminder) to stop whatever you’re doing, identify which emotion on this list best represents how you think you feel, and then scan your body.
Just notice what that emotion feels like. Do certain sensations stand out? Where are they? What do they look like in your mind? Are they tense, relaxed, cold, warm, dull, energetic? Just get curious.
This activity should only take a few minutes each time.
4) Parts Work: Integrating the Multifaceted Self
What if, beyond just being with these feelings and sensations, we were actually able to communicate with them? What if we could have a conversation? Parts work provides us with a framework to do just that. Imagine that your mind is actually a board room - full of well-intentioned board members who all have their own beliefs about how to best run the company. You are the CEO, but you are not a dictator. To get these board members to work together, they need to feel heard and empowered to be effective members of the team.
Approaching your inner world in terms of parts can be a profound practice all on its own. Whether you regard this metaphor as literal is entirely up to you. In the psychedelic space, this communication with parts can feel much more profound. Getting skilled with navigating these conversations can bring an immense amount of agency when working through something on a journey. The key is always remembering that no part has bad intentions for you, it likely just has a misguided strategy which it learned long ago. We’re all on the same team.
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Take 10 minutes each day to practice this daily parts work meditation.
Adopting any one of these daily practices is a wonderful and effective way to prepare for a healing and meaningful psychedelic experience. You can learn more about preparing yourself for a psychedelic experience by signing up for an individual psychedelic consultation with me - where I can give you tailored answers for your specific situation.
