01

Setting Your Intentions

Intentions are your compass. They give the experience direction without demanding a specific destination — and there's an important difference between the two.

Take time before your session to honestly reflect: What are you hoping to understand? What pain, pattern, or question are you carrying? Are you seeking clarity, healing, spiritual connection, or something harder to name? Write your intentions down and return to them in the days before your session.

Three prompts I find especially helpful for getting clear:

It's worth noting the difference between intentions and expectations. Holding your intentions loosely — with curiosity rather than demand — tends to open the door wider. Psilocybin often has its own wisdom about what needs attention, and some of the most meaningful sessions bring gifts we didn't know to ask for.

02

What You Might Experience

Psilocybin experiences are profoundly individual. No two sessions are the same, and there is no single map. What's consistent is this: whatever arises is part of your process.

You may encounter intense or unexpected emotions, vivid imagery, altered senses of time and space, old memories — even ones long forgotten — and moments of deep clarity or connection. You may feel profound gratitude, beauty, or a sense of unity with something larger than yourself. You may also encounter difficulty.

From a physical standpoint, some people experience nausea or trembling, especially early in the session. These experiences, while uncomfortable, are often therapeutic — a kind of release. They are welcome, normal, and something we'll navigate together.

When something challenging surfaces, here are practices that can help:

03

Self-Care Before the Session

The days leading up to your session are part of the preparation. What you consume, how you sleep, who you spend time with — all of it becomes part of the soil.

• Prioritize sleep — aim for 7–8+ hours each night
• Avoid alcohol, recreational drugs, and other substances
• Eat nourishing, familiar foods and stay well hydrated. Avoid spicy or unusual foods the day before
• Engage in grounding practices: breathwork, meditation, yoga, journaling, time in nature
• Limit screen time and be intentional about what you're consuming
• Write out your intentions clearly and revisit them
• Gather any items you wish to bring to the session

None of this is meant to create pressure or a sense of doing it "right." It's simply an invitation to bring some reverence to the days before.

04

Day-of Logistics

We'll review all the specifics of your session day during our preparation call. A few things to keep in mind:

• Wear loose, comfortable layers — body temperature fluctuates during sessions
• Fast the morning of your session. A high-protein dinner the night before helps. A small piece of fruit at least 2 hours before arrival is fine if needed
• Drink a normal amount of water. Black coffee or tea is okay. Avoid dairy in the coffee
• Bring items for the altar: photos of loved ones, a childhood photo of yourself, a meaningful object, a book
• Bring your journal and written intentions

05

After the Session: Integration

The session plants seeds. Integration is how you tend them.

In the days following your session, your brain has increased neuroplasticity — meaning you are genuinely more open to change and new patterns. Reduce screen time, protect your sleep, and give yourself spaciousness rather than rushing back into ordinary life. Journaling is particularly valuable in these days.

Think about what a daily practice might look like going forward. Often, deepening something you already have — a morning meditation, a regular walk, a breathwork practice — is more powerful than starting something entirely new. We'll develop this together on your integration call.

Be thoughtful about who you share your experience with, and when. The days immediately after a session can be tender, and it's worth protecting that space before opening it to others' interpretations.

Where Psilocybin Comes In

In supported, intentional settings, psilocybin has shown real promise for depression and anxiety. Randomized studies of psilocybin-assisted therapy have found meaningful reductions in depressive symptoms, and people often describe lasting increases in self-compassion, emotional openness, and a felt sense of connection — to themselves, to the people they love, and to something larger than themselves. For a mother moving through the identity shifts, intrusive thoughts, and harsh inner criticism that can accompany this season, that softening toward oneself can be profound.

I want to be honest about where the science stands: research focused specifically on the postpartum period is still in its early days, and this work is not a substitute for medical or mental-health care. If you are pregnant, nursing, or navigating more than the ordinary hard days, those are important conversations to have with a trusted provider first. But the very qualities that make this medicine meaningful for depression and anxiety — self-compassion, perspective, reconnection — are, I believe, exactly what so many of us are reaching for as we find our footing in motherhood.

A practice older than any of us

Humans have been in relationship with psilocybin mushrooms for thousands of years. Spanish colonial records describe Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica consuming sacred mushrooms they called teonanácatl, often translated as “flesh of the gods.” When colonization came, these practices were condemned and pushed into hiding, surviving quietly in remote communities that refused to let the tradition die.

That refusal is the only reason psilocybin reached the rest of us at all. So I want to say this plainly: the history of psilocybin is not a story of discovery. It's a story of people who protected something sacred at great cost, long before the outside world was paying attention.

Who María Sabina was

María Sabina Magdalena García lived her entire life in Huautla de Jiménez, in the Sierra Mazateca region of Oaxaca, born into a family of healers. She took part in her first velada, a sacred healing ceremony, when she was only around seven years old.

She called the mushrooms los niños santos, the holy children, or little saints. She didn't understand them as a “drug”. She understood them as a doorway, a way to look into the causes of someone's suffering and find the words that could help them heal. For decades she served her community as a curandera, guiding the sick through all-night ceremonies. Her chants, which arrived as spontaneous poetry she believed was given to her, are some of the most beautiful spiritual language of the twentieth century. The verse at the top of this post is one of them.

What happened inside the velada

Here is what I love about the velada: it was never about enjoyment or even comfort necessarily. Held in darkness through the night, it was intimate and sacred, and its entire purpose was healing. Healer and seeker would take the mushrooms together, and María Sabina would sing, calling in the little saints, weaving in Catholic prayer alongside older Mazatec cosmology, letting the words come as she believed they were meant to.

The goal was always the same: to find the root of a person's suffering and help restore them. When I think about what responsible facilitation reaches toward today, this is it. Psilocybin is not a shortcut. It's a medicine held inside relationship, ceremony, and care.

When the outside world arrived

In the summer of 1955, an American banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson traveled to Huautla and convinced María Sabina to let him take part in a velada. In May of 1957, he published his account, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” in Life magazine. A magazine editor coined that phrase, “magic mushroom,” for the headline, and almost overnight psilocybin was introduced to a mass audience.

For María Sabina, the cost was devastating. Seekers and curiosity-hunters descended on her small town by the hundreds, most of them with no reverence for what they had come to take. She faced persecution and rejection from her own community. Her home was reportedly burned down, and she lived her final years in poverty before she died in 1985. She came to believe that once the mushrooms were shared with outsiders who came for the wrong reasons, something sacred had been lost, and that the holy children had given up some of their purity.

Her story is a warning, and I think it belongs at the very center of this work. It warns us about losing the sacred through carelessness, about extraction, about broken trust and consent. My intention is to respect and honor María and her work by learning from her story, bringing to bear the lessons learned even from the long distance of reading about her. My takeaway is that we must hold this medicine with humility, reciprocity, and reverence rather than treating it as a product.

Carrying her forward

As psilocybin moves into regulated, therapeutic settings, I hope we remember María Sabina not as a footnote in a counterculture story, but as who she was: a master healer, a poet, a mother, a woman wise in medicine. The things we now call best practices, the intention-setting, the safety, the ceremony, the integration, are not new inventions. They are echoes of what she was already doing in the dark of an Oaxacan night.

To work with these mushrooms is to inherit her lineage, and I believe that inheritance asks something of us. It asks for humility. It asks for gratitude. It asks that we hold this medicine with the same care she did. When we sit with someone in ceremony, we are continuing something María Sabina gave her whole life to protect.

The healing power of awareness

There's a simple thread that connects nearly every tradition of inner work, from contemplative practice to indigenous ceremony. As our consciousness expands, we begin to see more clearly, ourselves, one another, and the living world we're woven into. And something curious happens alongside that clarity: we grow healthier. Not only in body, but in the harder-to-measure dimensions of meaning, connection, and wholeness.

This isn't a metaphor stretched thin. When we become genuinely aware of what we're carrying, the grief we've tucked away, the patterns we keep repeating, the parts of ourselves we've disowned, that awareness begins to loosen their grip. What stays hidden tends to keep running the show. What we bring into the light can finally soften, integrate, and change. Awareness, it turns out, is not a passive state. It is an active force. It is the precursor to change, to healing.

Opening the door between the seen and the unseen

From a psychological angle, we might describe certain practices, meditation, breathwork, ritual, and expanded states of consciousness, as opening a doorway between the conscious and unconscious dimensions of the psyche. Most of the time, that door stays shut. We move through our days on the surface of ourselves, managing, coping, performing. The deeper material, the memories, instincts, and beliefs that shape us, remain out of reach.

These practices crack the door open. They let the two halves of the psyche speak to each other. And in that conversation, healing becomes possible in a way it simply isn't when the unconscious is left sealed off. The material we've been avoiding doesn't need to be forced into view; given the right conditions, it rises on its own, ready to be met.

Lifting the veil

Many earth-based cultures describe this same threshold in their own language. For them, the expansion of consciousness is nothing less than the lifting of a veil, a thinning of the boundary between the human world and the realm of spirit. What a psychologist might call the unconscious, these traditions might call the eternal, the formless, the sacred ground beneath ordinary life.

The details differ, but the intuition rhymes. Both are pointing at the same experience: that there is more to us than the small, busy self we usually identify with. Beneath the personality and its endless preoccupations lies something older and steadier. And when we manage to reconnect with that deeper layer, the timeless dimension of who we are, we don't just feel calmer. We begin to remember something. We recover a sense of why we're here.

Remembering the soul's purpose

This may be the most quietly radical claim in all of it: that by touching the formless part of ourselves, we can rediscover the original wisdom and purpose of our own soul. Not invent it. Not construct it from scratch through willpower and self-improvement. Remember it. As if the blueprint had been there all along, waiting patiently beneath the noise for us to grow quiet enough to hear it.

So much of our suffering comes from having lost the thread of that purpose, from living out of alignment with who we most deeply are. We chase things that were never ours to want. We shape ourselves around expectations that were never ours to carry. And the exhaustion that follows isn't a personal failing. It's a signal. It's the soul asking to be remembered.

Expanded states of consciousness, approached with care and respect, can return us to that thread. They don't hand us a new self. They reintroduce us to the one that was always there.

Medicine we already carry

There's something deeply hopeful in all of this. If consciousness is the medicine, then the capacity to heal isn't something we have to acquire or afford. It's something we already carry. The work is not to become someone else, but to become more fully aware of who we already are, and to let that awareness do what it has always known how to do.

This is not a shortcut, and it isn't always comfortable. Real awareness asks us to look at what we'd rather not see. But it offers, in return, the one form of healing that reaches all the way down: the kind that doesn't just quiet our symptoms, but restores us to ourselves.