Preparing for the Journey: The Intensive Work That Happens Before the Trip

This is article 6 of 12 in the series “Facilitating Transformation: Insights from the Psychedelic Underground”

In this article, I focus on the preparation before a psychedelic journey, which seems to be where the most significant therapeutic work begins. The facilitators in my dissertation research were emphatic on this point: preparation is foundational. Long before the medicine is ingested, facilitators invest a great deal helping their clients build the internal scaffolding necessary to hold and integrate what they would encounter.

Why Preparation Is Non-Negotiable

I want to start by sharing from the facilitators. One facilitator compared preparation to how one would train for physically demanding trek or journey:

“When someone is going into a very evolved experience, what can they do to prepare? If I’m going to go on a 30-day solo hike through the Appalachians, how would I prepare? You can use a similar mindset when you’re going into these deep psychedelic experiences” (Interviewee 14).

This metaphor feels spot on. As someone deeply interested in human development, I know that changing our patterns and life quality – which are often the goals when taking psychedelics therapeutically – is not something you just snap your fingers and accomplish. And while winging it occasionally works, better to show up prepared. For a big trek, you make sure you have a map of the territory, the right backpack and supplies, a plan B. If the trek is intense enough, you may even invest in a trainer or a guide. With psychedelic work, some describe their experience as on par with giving birth. So yes: some effort around preparation feels appropriate.

Similarly, another facilitator described preparation in another way:

“In order to be able to digest the plant medicine work, it’s like we need to give people the tools for digestion. We need the digestive system enzymes before we eat the steak. If we eat the steak without preparation, we’re like, oh, I can’t digest this. That is what I see number one in the psychedelic world is people get a steak, they’ve never eaten steak before, they don’t have the digestive enzymes” (Interviewee 18).

The right preparation can help someone build their system up – with tools and resources, with education and appropriate expectations – so they don’t find themselves unable to process their experience. This is why some facilitators insisted on having multiple preparation sessions before any medicine sessions took place.

Another facilitator offered an important corrective to the field’s current emphasis on integration:

“What I find is that for those people who may not have prepped as well going into their journey, it will show in their integration… The prep work is really as important as the integration. I know that so many facilitators are putting so much emphasis on the integration, and I totally agree, but I would really like to shine a light on the prep work as just as important” (Interviewee 4).

The very muscles that someone flexes in preparation for their journey will strengthen them during their altered state and long into their integration. In this way, the best integration plan starts with a strong preparation plan.

Establishing Safety (From the Inside Out)

Safety, as I've touched on in previous articles, is foundational to all phases of a journey. This is especially true for preparation, because this is when the seeds for safety are planted.

Safety is so much more than a checklist. In practice, the facilitators in my study described building it in layers, across several dimensions at once:

• There's safety within, which includes someone’s own capacity and comfort to be with their body, their sensations, their emotional reality, without getting overwhelmed by them. One facilitator alluded to this: “I want to get them really dialed into their body first before we take them into that altered state… If they drop into a psychedelic journey and they don’t even have the context of what energy feels like, they’re going to feel like fish out of water” (Interviewee 4).

• There's safety and trust between people. Some facilitators cultivate this with their client, ideally over multiple connection points, before any medicine enters the room:

  "You must have a strong rapport with a client. Do you trust me? Do I trust you? I want to feel like there's trust here, right? When people come in and they just want to do medicine, I'm like, oh, no, no. We have many sessions before we do medicine… We're not even trying to be friends — we're just developing the ability to know that we're safe with each other" (Interviewee 8).

• There's safety and even familiarity with the physical space itself – intentionally preparing the room, the logistics, the sensory environment a client will eventually walk into. One facilitator shared: “I have them come over here to the space to meet for an hour or so. They know where to park, they know where the door is… They’re not getting oriented the day they’re in medicine; they come ahead of time and get oriented to the space” (Interviewee 3).

• Then, of course, there's safety that gets built more indirectly, through nearly everything else in this article: the customization, the intention-setting, the skill development, the education, the psychological groundwork.

When done well, thorough preparation can reduce adverse reactions, as one facilitator described:

“I have never had anyone freak out. People have these incredibly gentle experiences where they just slip into this deep space… Everyone knows exactly where their places are on the stage. So when they get here, they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve already done this before’” (Interviewee 13).

As I sit with what these facilitators shared, the resounding message is that preparation promotes safety and safety reduces risk. When someone understands how things are going to go within an altered state, how to listen to themselves, how they’ll work with their facilitator, what the environment and experience might be like, it can calm down their nervous system before the psychedelic experience. And developmentally, I’d argue that a calmed nervous system is foundational for sustained growth and therapeutic progress.  

Education About the Medicine

Another preparation pillar is all about making sure clients understood what they were working with and how their journey might go. This might seem obvious, but facilitators described it as far from a given: “It's important to walk them through the process because usually there's some kind of process that they're not thinking about, like, how does this work?” (Interviewee 12). Even motivated, well-prepared clients can come into this work without a clear understanding of the actual substance they're about to take: what it is, why someone might choose it, what it's likely to do in the body and brain, what are the risks it carries, and what might happen in the experience.

One facilitator likened it to briefing someone before a wilderness expedition:

"Let's say you're going to go into the jungle in Mexico. And before you head off on your jungle journey, you want your guide to kind of give you an idea of the landscape: okay, here's what we might come across. You might see snakes. You gotta keep looking out for those, but don't be scared because they'll be helpful... What you're doing is you're giving them an idea of what might appear, so when they experience it, they're like, oh, I already know about this" (Interviewee 4).

Of course, learning about psychedelics and experiencing psychedelics are two completely different things. All the education in the world can’t prepare someone for what they might experience. Even still, having a foundation for what might happen can normalize what occurs, which may reduce anxiety in the session, as this facilitator describes:

"I tell them about some of the sensations they may feel in their body and how normal that is, how the nervous system and somatics kind of release these things. They may yawn, their teeth may chatter, they may be hot, they may be cold, they may be nauseous. So know that all of those things are not only normal but positive"(Interviewee 19).

Another facilitator shared a powerful framework for understanding the range of experiences a journey might hold:

"...you could experience what is called school. In your journey, you can learn a lot. You may find that the medicine is teaching you things... Then you may have another kind of experience that we refer to as church or bliss and it's just complete love... And then there's the hospital... Hospital is really deep work. There's stuff that's very trauma-based... explaining this to them before they step into their journey equips them to know"(Interviewee 4).

School, church, and hospital - learning, bliss, and difficult healing work. Naming these possibilities in advance certainly won’t eliminate the unknown, but it does offer clients something of a map, so that whatever arises, some part of them can recognize it rather than panic.

Skill Building: The Practices That Prepare the Nervous System

Education helps someone know what to expect. But it’s the skill building that promotes one's capacity and confidence to meet the experience, and maybe even to get the most out of it. Instead of passively receiving information, skill building is active. It requires hands-on effort. While not everyone can or will put forth this type of effort, one facilitator shared what can happen when someone hasn’t developed a practice:

"I always start with, have you ever done this kind of work before? And a lot of times it's no... I will tell them, if you're going to do this work, you're going to need a practice because... it's only going to go so far if you don't, and... if you do this work enough, you're going to run into hard times... and if you don't have a practice, it's going to be way more painful than it needs to be" (Interviewee 11).

I found this aspect of preparation exciting: facilitators perceived preparation as an opportunity to build a toolkit that someone could call on both during the journey and in the months of integration that follow.

The most frequently recommended skill was meditation. It was seen as a rehearsal for sitting with intensity:

"The skills that I like to work with are, one, meditation. And getting to a place where they can meditate in their own space without having someone talk to them... that just naturally helps support them in their journey work" (Interviewee 2).

Other skills that were mentioned were somatic tools, like breathwork and body scans:

"First off, I'm building up a few different somatic tools for them... I'm teaching them a little bit of breathwork, how to do a body scan... I'm making sure they have access to understanding their body" (Interviewee 6).

Another facilitator treated self-compassion as its own trainable skill, particularly for clients carrying trauma:

"If they're going in with the mindset that something is 'wrong' with them, it's going to be much harder to receive what the medicine has to offer. The more they can practice meeting themselves with kindness now, the better they'll be able to navigate what arises" (Interviewee 14).

And one facilitator connected skill-building directly to intuition: "We're taught that somebody else has the answer... but learning how to listen to self... that's what will guide you... One of the first skills is developing that sense of intuition."(Interviewee 12).

None of these practices are especially exotic. Meditation, breath, body awareness, self-compassion are staples of many wellness circles, so it might be easy to underrate them for exactly that reason. But familiarity is exactly the point. What makes them preparation is repetition. Practicing them long before they're needed, so that when the moment actually calls for them, a client isn't reaching for a tool they've never held. They're reaching for something they already know how to use. Plus, a client who has developed these types of skills ahead of time isn't just better equipped for the journey itself -- they have created the space and focus to better hold and integrate their experiences long after their journey.

Setting Intentions (and Holding Them Loosely)

Intention-setting is perhaps the best-known element of psychedelic preparation. In the field, an intention is generally understood not as a goal to achieve, but as a focused hope or theme that gives a person's attention somewhere to land. Yet interestingly, its importance wasn’t agreed upon by facilitators in my study. Some facilitators believed a person must come to their medicine journey with clear intentions, treating the process almost as an act of manifestation:

"Start with intention... And then speak out loud what it is that you're trying to cultivate as if it's already happened…You always want to speak as if it's already happened... You are the driver and the creator of your life" (Interviewee 20).

Others supported clients in clarifying their intentions, but wanted them to be careful not to cling to them:

"The whole idea of intentions is way more than just, like, come up with a few intentions, you know? I shy away from that. I tell them, it's helpful to have a hope or a direction or something, but if you're gripping to that intention, like, you're gonna miss a lot of stuff. So, hold it loosely" (Interviewee 26).

Some facilitators shared how the medicine has its own intelligence. It may address something deeper or more urgent than what the conscious mind set out to heal.

So while intentions might provide direction, how much weight to give them seems to depend on the facilitator. Some facilitators leaned toward clarity and conviction, others toward openness and surrender. But nearly all of them agreed on one thing: it's a conversation worth having before the journey begins.

Diet, Lifestyle, and the Body

Rooted in spiritual and Indigenous traditions, many facilitators incorporated some variation of physical and lifestyle preparation into their process. Many times, this involved dietary changes like reducing sugar, stimulants and alcohol, stepping back from social media, and in some cases, tapering pharmaceutical medications.

"I tell my clients to detox social media, detox toxic relationships, and do their best to cut down and declutter their life, even as much as one to two weeks prior, so that they're really as present and ready to surrender as possible." (Interviewee 17)

The facilitator went further, incorporating holistic and nutritional protocols:

"To prepare, I get them into daily meditation practices. I'll give them some breathwork videos and other things that I've created to help prepare them and their bodies. We talk about nutrition and the dieta. I'll even give them supplemental protocols or superfood protocols if they have any digestive issues or if they have had a lot of addiction… I really want to prepare their gut-brain, not just their head-brain and heart-brain" (Interviewee 17).

For other facilitators, preparation practices focused more on clearing away the noise of daily life so a someone could arrive genuinely present:

"How do you clear the path and clear your mind so that you don't come in with a whole lot of influence from our world around us, which can be so disturbing? How do you clear that so you come in clear-minded? So, preparing the mind and the body is the primary thing that we talk about" (Interviewee 12).

In our busy 21st century culture of constant digital stimulation and low-grade chronic stress, this kind of conscious fasting seems like an important intervention on the nervous system, creating stillness and physiological ease that might really support someone’s receptivity to the experience.

Managing Expectations and Psychological Preparation: Lean Into What’s Hard

Psychological preparation included helping clients navigate their fears and adjust unrealistic expectations before the session. It’s common for clients to arrive hoping for a beautiful, transcendent experience, so it is supportive for facilitators to prepare them for the possibility of encountering the opposite. Without this prep work, a client may experience unnecessary shame, guilt, or disappointment if they don’t receive the journey they hoped for.

Facilitators described this to be one of the most critical pieces of preparation (and from what I can tell, one of the more counterintuitive practices): teaching clients to move toward discomfort instead of away from it. One facilitator described:

"I see people going through distraction phases and wanting to push pain away. I see that a lot. It's good to develop softness and say, 'hey, when that comes up, maybe let's just stay there for a second and feel it, because it's okay to do that.' We have been so programmed to push everything down and away, distracting ourselves from the things that we're feeling when those things need to be felt" (Interviewee 9).

Another facilitator shared about the same principle, adding that it’s possible – if willing to go into the challenging experience - to change the quality of it so isn’t so challenging:

"If you're going to run away from Bowser when he shows up, you ain't getting to the next level. I've been telling them from the get-go, I'm encouraging them to go into the hard. I'm telling them: I want to go with you to your hell. You'll take me to your hell, right? We're going to make that a paradise. Like, hell's not so bad" (Interviewee 1).

A first step to this process includes helping clients believe their own pain is real in the first place. One of the facilitators described a common pattern she sees where clients minimize their own suffering, and thus can’t begin their healing journey:

"What I find is that people will come in and they'll tell me, oh, my childhood was really hard... and they don't really believe it yet because they were told in some way that's not true or it was minimized... they'll keep saying, oh, it was really hard, but it's not like I was in a war, or it's not like I was homeless. And then they'll be like, but it was really hard, and they'll loop because they haven't landed. And until they've landed and feel justified in feeling their hurt, they can't start healing from it" (Interviewee 15).

Growth, several facilitators noted, requires stepping into water where your feet can't quite touch the bottom, finding growth edges – which is often uncomfortable:

"David Bowie talks about the creative process, and he's like, what you do as an artist is wade into the deep end of the pool and your feet can barely touch the bottom. Then you wade out a little bit further. And that's where you've got to go. That's how you grow your roots. That's how you grow taller. We can't stay in the same place and expect evolution to happen" (Interviewee 14).

Importantly, some facilitators weren’t trying to advocate for the elimination of pain, or to fix something that was broken, but to simply learn how to be with the discomfort:

"There is this tendency to try to get rid of the pain or fix the pain, fix the discomfort. And ultimately, I think any of us that have been in this work for any amount of time recognize: that's part of it. Actually, what we're learning is how to be with the most challenging of our emotions and not try to fix them or get rid of them but just be with them. And that's one of the hardest things that I've learned" (Interviewee 12).

Facilitators also understood that a challenging or 'bad' experience could hold incredible value for the therapeutic process. One facilitator put it simply: “It's not about you having a ‘bad trip.’ It's about you doing some really deep work” (Interviewee 4). To me, this reframe — of what actually counts as 'bad' — is one of the most profound and empowering shifts that can be made during preparation. It asks someone to relate to their pain differently: not as a punishment to escape, but as a teacher with something to share.

Getting Personal: Customizing the Process

After reflecting on all the facilitators’ approaches, one of my favorite observations is that there isn’t a single approach that I’d consider a one-size-fits-all. Facilitators consistently emphasized that good preparation requires getting to know each client individually, including their history, their sensitivities, their cultural framework, and even their sensory preferences.

For example, facilitators customized the doses of medicine that their client’s received: “I actually tailor the dosage to the individual based on a lot of factors, like their experience previously, what they want to experience, etcetera” (Interviewee 7).

Some facilitators crafted playlists with a specific client in mind. Scents were considered. One facilitator described asking clients whether they preferred sage, palo santo, or lavender oil. Even the language used in preparation materials was adapted:

“I took my prep book, and I changed the languaging a bit for [a client], for it to have more Christian languaging, so it felt more approachable for her. I talk more about science-based things with her when it comes to energetic things” (Interviewee 19).

This personalized care is supportive for so many reasons. It helps cultivate trust between the facilitator and client, it ensures that individual needs are met, and people respond better when they know they are being listened to and their preferences are being considered.

The Preparation as Ceremony

Perhaps most significantly, facilitators in my research described the preparation process itself as ceremonial, as an act of showing up for oneself that sets the tone for everything that follows:

“The preparation process is not just to make sure that your journey goes well, but I think it’s ceremonial in showing up for yourself. I really love seeing that in my clients and being able to see them start making changes in their lives. And the first step is really being committed to yourself” (Interviewee 4).

In sum, the facilitators in this study consistently echoed this sentiment, which is perhaps the crux of why preparation is important:

“The amount of work and commitment that you put into preparing for this will be paid back and the medicine will meet you and show up with just as much effort. It will mirror and match that. It’s just about the commitment” (Interviewee 4).

Just like other areas of life, one gets out of this work what they put into it. So while there are endless ways to invest in a journey, facilitators encourage clients to put forth effort ahead of the journey. Go all in when it comes to preparation, as it will undoubtedly impact the quality of the experience.

Next up: the heart of the facilitation arc - what actually happens during the psychedelic session itself.

This article series is based on original dissertation research interviewing 27 underground psychedelic facilitators across the United States.