So you have decided to do this. The deciding might have taken months, or it might have happened all at once, but it is settled now, and almost immediately a new worry moves in to take fear's place. You start reading about how to get ready, and there is so much of it. Set your intentions, but do not hold them too tightly. Follow a special diet. Write a letter to the mushrooms. Eat, or do not eat. Take time off, journal, meditate, clear your calendar. Somewhere in all of that it begins to feel like there is a right way and a wrong way to prepare, and that if you do not get it exactly right you will ruin the thing you have been waiting for.
So I will say the most important thing first: you cannot fail at this. Preparation is not a test, and there is no single missed step that ruins a journey. What it comes down to is arriving ready to meet whatever the day brings, clearheaded, settled in your body, and not by yourself. Everything below serves that.
Set and setting
Most of what you read will come back to two words, set and setting, and they are worth understanding, because nearly everyone in this work agrees on them.
Set is your mindset, what you carry in with you. You want to come in clear, which is not the same as coming in empty. An open and honest willingness to look inward is what you are after, and the more openly you arrive, the more there is to work with.
Setting is the physical space and the people in it. The room should feel safe and comfortable to you, with nothing around you pulling you towards anxiety or pressing on a tender spot. That includes the person guiding you. If something about your guide gives you pause, even something you cannot quite put words to, that is worth raising before any medicine is taken.
To those two I add a third that most lists leave out. Skill set.
Skill set
By skill set I mean the handful of things you can lean on in the moment, if the journey speeds up past where you want it or turns difficult. In our preparation sessions, I will walk you through some of these. Mostly they are ways of coming back into your body when everything else is moving fast: slowing the breath, grounding, noticing what you feel in your hands or your feet.
These are not drills. I would never hand you a technique to rehearse until it is automatic, because that is not how this works. The skills are more of a mindset than a task, something more fluid than a box you finish and check off. The breathing in particular is like meditation. It is a practice, never something you are fully done with.
When we practice grounding together, it might look like me asking what you are feeling in a specific part of your body, so you have somewhere to put your attention instead of feeling like you are losing your grip. And if you forget all of it in the moment, which people do, that is exactly what I am there for. I will walk you back through it. You will never be alone in it.
Preparing the body
The mind is not the only thing that gets ready. The body does too, and the traditions understood this long before the clinical world caught up.
In traditional ceremonial settings, Indigenous practitioners often guide people through something called a dieta in the days before and after. In Mazatec practice, for example, that can mean abstaining from red meat, spicy food, and sexual intercourse, a way of honoring the mushrooms and readying the body for what it is about to undertake. I share this out of respect for where it comes from, not as a protocol I am handing you.
What I recommend to my own clients is gentler and more practical. Eat a clean meal the night before. The morning of, keep it very small, and if you can, reach for a banana. The nausea a lot of people feel comes from chitin, the tough material in the mushroom's cell walls, and a banana carries an enzyme that helps break it down. It is folk wisdom more than settled science, but the reasoning holds, and I have watched it help. I also ask clients to set aside alcohol and any other substances for a few days beforehand, so the body arrives clean and unclouded.
Intentions, held loosely
Intentions matter, though not as much as the internet would have you believe. An intention gives you something to anchor to, a question or a hope you can return to if the journey gets blurry or loud. That is real, and worth doing.
The journey does not always go where your intention points, though, and that is not a failure. I think of the mushrooms as another guide in the room. They tend to be the ones who decide where this goes. So set an intention, sit with it, write it down if that helps, then loosen your grip on it. The people who struggle most are often the ones holding on too hard, circling back to "but I never got to my intention, so I must have done it wrong." You did not do it wrong, you went exactly where you needed to go.
The days on either side
Preparation does not begin and end on the day of the journey. The window around it matters too, on both sides.
If you can take time off work, do. It gives you more room to slow down before the journey, and more room to land softly after. If that is not possible, that is okay too, plenty of people do this well without clearing the whole calendar. What I would ask either way is that you pull back on the high-stimulus stuff in the days leading up, the news, the scrolling, whatever keeps you wired, so you arrive a little more connected to yourself. If you can, get outside. Take a walk. You do not have to disappear into the woods for three days, just find a small way to be with nature and with yourself.
The days after ask something different of you. You will likely feel raw and tender, more emotional than usual, and the kindest thing you can do is go gently. There is a phrase that circulates in this community, borrowed from Zen: chop wood, carry water. It means returning to the small, ordinary tasks that do not ask much of your mind, easing back into daily life one small thing at a time.
This is also where integration lives. At its simplest, integration is sitting down with your guide afterward and talking through whatever surfaced, then finding ways to carry it into your everyday life. I think this stretch matters as much as the journey itself, because it is when your mind is most pliable, most able to take an insight and turn it into something that lasts.
Writing it down
One of the most useful things you can do in the days after is write. Insights from a journey are slippery. They can feel carved in stone in the moment and then start to thin out by the next afternoon, and a few sentences on paper will hold onto something you would otherwise lose. There is no right way to do it. You do not need full pages or tidy paragraphs, a list works, a single word works, a drawing works. Some people write the morning after, some keep a notebook by the bed for the days that follow, when dreams often get vivid and more rises to the surface. Whatever you put down becomes something real to bring into our integration time together. It is the journey in your own words, which is something even my own notes cannot hold for you.
One last thing
Please do not turn this into one more thing to get right. You cannot study your way into a perfect journey, and you cannot ruin it with a forgotten step. Arrive as ready as you can, take care of yourself, and let me carry some of the worry for you. You will not be doing this alone.