It took me a long time to go on my first guided journey, and the reason is almost embarrassing. I was scared of what I'd look like to my guide. I was such a nervous wreck about it that I canceled a few times before I actually went through with it. So if some version of that is what's keeping you stuck, I get it, I've been right where you are. Let me walk you through what a journey actually feels like. Not the scary trip-report version, and not the breathless everything-will-change version either, just the honest one.
First the honest thing. No two journeys are the same, and no two people feel this the same way. I can tell you what tends to happen, and I can tell you what happens for me, but mine is just one example. It isn't a map you should expect yours to match. Some of what I describe will fit you and some of it won't, and that's fine, that's how it's supposed to be.
Set, setting, and skill set
Before the medicine even comes into it, there's an idea in the psychedelic community called set and setting, and it shapes pretty much everything that follows.
Set is your mindset, what you're bringing into the journey with you. It's one of the big reasons the preparation session matters so much. We get you into the right headspace, we talk through your intentions, and we talk about the kinds of things that might surface and how we'll work with them.
Setting is the place, the environment the journey is held in. I have a dedicated journey space in my home that's calm and quiet. That said, some people feel more grounded in their own space, and if that's you, I'm glad to journey with you at home instead.
There's a third S I picked up from my training with Medicinal Mindfulness in Boulder, and that's skill set. It's what the guide brings, and it's what you bring too, the ways you've already learned to steady yourself when things get hard. All of that comes into the room with you.
The come-up
For most people the come-up happens somewhere in the first 15 to 90 minutes, depending on how fast you metabolize and how you took the medicine. For me, the start of it feels like melting into the ground. The people with me can actually see it happen, my chest flushes, and that's how my guide knows I'm really entering the experience.
You might feel a little nausea in this stretch. That's normal, and it tends to settle as you move further into the experience. I keep natural nausea remedies on hand for it too. Sometimes people purge, and if that happens for you, it's welcome. In a lot of traditions purging is seen as releasing something you've been holding onto, so it can be a meaningful part of the journey rather than something to be afraid of.
You might also get a wave of anxiety in the come-up, that "okay, I've taken the mushrooms and there's no going back now" feeling. That's normal too. As the medicine fully takes hold, your amygdala, the brain's fear center, quiets down, and that early anxiety tends to ease with it. And then things start to shift. Colors get brighter, the room might breathe a little, and you get those first mild hallucinations.
The peak
The peak usually lasts about two to three hours, and like everything else here, it's different for everyone. What you'll probably notice is that your perception changes. Time stops behaving normally, reality feels different, and you might see visions. Mine tend to have a heartbeat to them, almost like a drum. Other people don't see visions at all, they see shifting, distorted patterns, more like looking through a kaleidoscope.
Most people feel a strong sense of connection during this part, and a big rush of empathy, like you're tied to the earth and to other people and to something bigger than yourself. Your senses can blur together, so you might see a sound or hear a color. Some people have full mystical experiences and come away describing a sense of a higher power.
Your body is along for the ride too. You might feel waves of warmth or cold, what some people call energy moving through them. My hands and feet get freezing, so I always pack fuzzy socks, and I've got a blanket with little pockets for my hands and feet, and I keep a heating pad nearby because I get so cold. Almost none of this is left to chance, it gets thought about ahead of time.
There's also this phrase, "losing yourself," that gets thrown around a lot, and I think it scares people more than it needs to. What I think is really going on is a softening of the ego. Your grip on yourself loosens just enough that you can let go a little and see things through a softer, more empathetic lens.
When it gets difficult
Some of this can be hard, and I'm not going to pretend it can't. But here's how I'd reframe difficult for you, because difficult doesn't have to mean bad. A lot of the time it just means something is hard to look at, and if you're willing, there are ways to move through it. We can also slow the whole thing down and reset the energy a bit, ease the journey towards somewhere different. These moments are normal, and I'm ready for them.
In our preparation session, I give you tools to take in with you, like deep breathing, and I teach you how to ground yourself. That way, when the big moments come, and they might, you've already got something to reach for. I'm also there the whole time. If things start moving too fast or feeling like too much, I might have you sit up, slip off your eye shades, take a sip of water, just to slow it down and let you reset. The main thing is this, you're never alone in it.
What if I cry, or need the bathroom, or look like a mess
This is the exact fear that kept me canceling my first psilocybin journey, so let me just answer it head-on. Whatever shows up, shows up. All of it is normal and all of it is welcome.
Some people stay silent the whole time. Some make noise. Some talk nonstop, and some can't get a word out. It really is different person to person. Your body might do its own thing too. I usually end up in all sorts of strange positions, stretching and moving around on the ground, what I call my psychedelic yoga, and that's perfectly fine. If you need the restroom, I'll walk you there, because everything feels distorted in the medicine and I want you steady on your feet. If you cry, good, cry. I bring two boxes of Kleenex to every journey because I'm a crier myself, I cry at the hard parts and I cry at the beautiful ones, the kind so far past words that all you can do is go "ah." There is truly nothing you can do in this space that you need to feel embarrassed about. There's no right or wrong way to have this experience, as long as it's held safely.
Coming down, and the afterglow
After the peak you kind of plateau, and then you start coming down slowly. You're still in the medicine a bit, so the colors and the breathing room and the soft hallucinations are still hanging around, but you're more grounded now, and you can start reflecting on what the experience brought up. It's a nice time to relax and sink into the space, to let your nervous system come back to itself after whatever your peak was, the hard part or the exciting part or both.
Then there's the afterglow. This is where you've landed and you're seeing things with a clearer perspective. The better mood, the clarity, that sense of connection, it all kind of settles in here. It's also when your neural pathways are at their most pliable, which, yes, is where my practice got its name. This is the window where you get to look at what the journey showed you, figure out what you want to carry forward, and start thinking about any changes you might want to make in your everyday life.
One thing worth knowing is that you're still really raw in this phase. You're tender, more sensitive than usual, so it's a time to take good care of yourself, getting out in nature, taking a walk, journaling, that kind of thing. And a few days later, once you've fully landed, we do the integration session, where we sit down and talk through what came up and how to bring it into your life. That's where a lot of the actual work happens.
The honest version of "transformative"
Everybody wants to tell you this is going to be life-changing, and I think that can make it scarier instead of less scary, like you're supposed to come out the other side a totally different person. So here's the honest version. You get out what you put in. If you come in wanting it to be transformative, it can be, but it's rarely a one-and-done. Most people don't walk out of a single journey as somebody new. It's a lot like therapy that way, you don't go to one session expecting your whole life to flip over.
I've heard people call it 10 therapy sessions in one, and I think there's something to that, but only because of what you bring to it. How you prepare, when you start preparing, how much effort you put in, and then the integration at the end, that's where the real transformation actually lives.
There's a saying in the psychedelic community that the journey starts the moment you decide to go on it. I love that one. It means the preparation is already part of it, and it means that if you're sitting here feeling the pull and the fear at the same time, you might already have a foot on the path. It doesn't really end, either. You keep working with it. It was never meant to be a one-and-done fix.