Over the past few years, I’ve had the honor of contributing to literally hundreds of people’s journeys of becoming a psychedelic therapist, guide, or facilitator.
Just last week I was honored to give a lecture with the Jungian Mystery School, a well-wrought course on Jungian psychology and psychedelics, curated by the good folks at Applied Jung.
Currently, we are mid-way through our third cohort of Inner Trek, the leading psilocybin training program for licensed facilitators in Oregon. It’s an immense privilege, and an immense responsibility, to try to instill the values, ethics, perspectives, and practices that I believe this new generation of psychedelic leaders need.
And, the psychedelic field is saturated by charlatans, grifters, and people who simply don’t have their shit together. Trust me on this. Perhaps you’ve met a few yourself.
This isn't about being perfect, moral superiority, or canceling anyone. I’m just pointing out the fact that the field of psychedelics could do with a serious upgrade in what are commonly called “leadership skills.” A few good books have been written on the subject, and I hope more continue to be. I’ve dedicated an entire chapter in my book on the role of the leader, which most of this article is based on.
This article is but a small pebble thrown into an ocean of perspectives, personalities, and preferences. As always, take nothing here as doctrine or dogma. I wrote this in the hopes that it may serve one or two of you as you find your own way along this spiral road.
These are the things I wish someone had taken me aside and told me before I began working as a psychedelic therapist.
Examining Our Relationship to Power
Psychedelics are crystallizations of power. Stay in proximity to this power long enough, and it will magnify your relationship to it, pointing directly to the parts of this relationship that need attention. No one is immune to, above, or past this process. Power is an archetypal energy that affects everyone in strange ways.
Ecofeminist author Starhawk talks about three types of power: power-over, power-from-within, and power-with. She writes, “Power-over is linked to domination and control; power-from-within is linked to the mysteries that awaken our deepest abilities and potential. Power-with is social power, the influence we wield among equals.”
Symbiotic patterns in nature exemplify power-with relationships, which embrace collaboration, transparency, and participation. The “three sisters” method of Indigenous agriculture, where corn, beans, and squash all grow together in a supportive dance, depicts a power-with dynamic in a beautiful way. The corn provides a stable stalk for the bean vines to climb upon, while the wide leaves of the squash cover the soil, keeping it moist. The dynamic relationality of ecosystems shows us what true power-with relationships might look like.
Some questions to ask yourself when examining your relationship to power:
How does having power make you feel?
What thoughts or emotions arise?
Can you recall a moment in your life when you felt completely powerless?
Can you think of examples of power-with relationships or systems that inspire you?
Who or what embodies healthy leadership archetypes to you?
This can be a real or fictional person, an animal, or an aspect of nature.
What would tempt you to abuse your power?
What community structures can you surround yourself with that can offer you reliable reflection?
Whom do you trust to offer you clear and honest feedback?
Doing Your Own Work
Examining your relationship to power is also an introspective act. Therefore, doing your own work, especially with psychedelic medicines, becomes an ethical requirement of any psychedelic facilitator or healer. I’m not saying you need to be tripping all the time. Rather, it is an ethical imperative to maintain an ongoing relationship with the medicines you are serving others or claiming to “carry.”
Would you trust a pilot who is scared of flying? Would you take a prescription from a doctor who doesn’t believe in pharmaceuticals?
There is a question that occasionally arises in certain corners of the psychedelic world: does a psychedelic therapist need to have personal psychedelic experience in order to be a worthy guide? I would emphatically say yes.
While working as a psilocybin retreat leader at MycoMeditations in Jamaica, it was an unspoken agreement among the team that periodically taking mushrooms was simply part of the job. Not only did we need to test each new batch of mushrooms we were offering clients, but the nature of the work also requires a relationship and familiarity with the medicine that can only be built by taking it. Imagine the countless hours spent in psychedelic space by the many Indigenous practitioners who continue to hone their craft across the world. All of that time is an investment in this relationship between human and something decidedly more than human.
Doing your own work does not exclusively refer to psychedelic work, either. Having practices for looking inward, receiving honest reflection, and returning to one’s center are what’s important. This could be therapy, meditation, men’s or women’s circles, or other forms of council circles, for instance. Doing this work in the community is a vital aspect of this spiral road.
Community
The more community you can surround yourself with, the more people whom you trust enough to offer clear and sometimes harsh feedback, the less likely you are to unconsciously act out your shadow material when it comes to power.
As a psychotherapist, I meet with a mentor at least once a month in order to process my experiences and share what is alive for me personally. We do dream analysis, discuss my personal life, and explore the endless pathways of depth psychology. I’ve also done this in a group, which has the added bonus of reflection from diverse perspectives. In therapy-speak, this is called “supervision” because a professional therapist subjects themselves to the watchful eyes of trusted peers and elders in the field. It is an extremely valuable process that I believe should be a requirement of any psychedelic guide and facilitator, especially in our new era of legal, regulated use.
As legal prohibitions continue to loosen around psychedelics in many places, the risks of building community around psychedelic healing are hopefully becoming much less of a concern.
Here are a few ways you can build community around psychedelic work:
Start a professional consultation group for other facilitators or guides in your area.
Start a peer-led journey and/or integration group.
Create opportunities to gather and share skills, perspectives, and reflections with each other.
Get creative. Make art together. Throw a potluck. Create opportunities to engage in genuine community building that go beyond the field of psychedelics. Be human.
Projection
Power magnetizes both conscious and unconscious psychic material. When doing deep work with people, some of this material will inevitably take the form of a projection: a feeling or story someone has about you that is not entirely based in reality but emerges mostly out of their own unconscious psyche.
Projections can be positive, too. I’ve had clients say incredibly flattering things to me that my ego loved hearing. Yet overwhelming praise can veer toward idealization that is just as subjective or unreal as its negative counterpart.
Charismatic leaders thrive on these idealized projections, as do the shadow archetypes of the Guru, Dark Sorcerer, and Eternal Youth. Often, their empire comes crashing down when their followers come to the shocking realization that the idealized figure is yet another flawed, ordinary human being.
I’ll admit, it feels damn good to be showered in praise. It balances out all the difficult and emotionally taxing aspects of this work. But to take this praise with anything less than a grain of salt runs the risk of ego inflation and grandiosity.
Lastly, we need community to help us discern if something is just a projection or actually an unconscious part of ourselves that we are unable to see. Simply writing off challenging reflections as projections is a tricky road that can enable all sorts of manipulative behavior. Before labeling something as a projection, it is your responsibility to ask those around you for feedback. But if you are grounded in yourself, ethical in your behavior, surrounded by a trusted community of peers, doing your own work, and willing to receive hard feedback, then you’re doing good work.
Self-Care for Guides
I’m still figuring this one out myself. For therapists and psychedelic facilitators, self-care is the foundation upon which everything else stands. But for those of us with a penchant for giving, the last person we usually give to is ourselves. I’m not going to pretend I have this one figured out or drum up tired clichés like telling you to do more yoga or take a bath.
What I can personally speak to, however, is experiencing a level of burnout I never knew was possible, and what I learned from it. These simple mantras speak to some hard lessons I’ve learned. You can revisit them when the going gets rough or when you’ve found yourself frustrated, struggling, or exhausted (as you inevitably will).
I hope they serve you well:
Recovery is real. One day of psychedelic facilitation may not equate with the same amount of time required to recover. Don’t underestimate how much recovery time you need. Which leads to my next point:
Remember the frog in the pot. Burnout creeps into your life slowly. Sometimes we don’t realize we’re getting cooked until we suddenly discover we have no energy left for our closest relationships and find little joy in our work. Our coping mechanisms and self-soothing strategies might slowly become more toxic. The things we know are good for us start to fall by the wayside. We become emotionally reactive, raw, or flat. These are all signs that we are burned out. Recognize them and take a break before you get cooked.
Mistakes are human. What matters is how you show up for the repair.
Be gentle on yourself. Self-compassion is vital. Perfection is not required.
You can lead a horse to water—but not beyond. Everyone is on their own journey, and their choices often have very little to do with you. There is a limit to what we can do for another person. We must do our best to serve others without an attachment to the outcome.
If this article resonates with you and you are wanting to deepen your knowledge, skills, and experience in the realm of psychedelic facilitation and healing, there are just a few spots left (literally) at my Facilitator’s Circle retreat, happening August 22nd-25th outside of Portland, Oregon.
If you’re interested and would like to register, please shoot me a message below, or send an email to depthmedicine@gmail.com.
This article was based on extracts from my book, Psychedelics and the Soul: A Mythic Guide to Psychedelic Healing, Depth Psychology, and Cultural Repair, coming out October 1st and now available for pre-order!
Order your copy here or through my favorite independent bookstore, Powell’s Books. It means a lot to new authors like me.
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congratulations & beautiful transmission brother! Keep up the great work!