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Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that knows it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. 💔

Grief is, in short, brutal.

It’s so heavy and it comes in such unforgiving waves that it feels weird to crack jokes about it, even for us. (Yes, we can in fact read the room.)

Lots of Cyclists have written in about losing someone, and about whether a psilocybin journey could help.

So, for today’s newsletter, we asked our network of licensed psilocybin facilitators: How do you work with people who are grieving? 

They share their perspectives after the jump. 

This experience is a private, single-day psilocybin journey in Lakewood, CO designed specifically around grief and loss. If today's newsletter hits home, this one's worth a look. The facilitator draws on Ayurveda, somatic healing, and trauma-informed psychotherapy to shape the session around you.

As painful as it is to hold, grief isn’t an illness you treat or cure. Kate Schroeder gets on her soapbox: “I think one of the greatest mistakes our culture makes is treating grief like a problem to solve rather than an experience to accompany.” Grief is different from sadness or depression, she says: “It’s love with nowhere obvious to go.” 

And since it’s not going anywhere, Char McKendrick helps grieving clients practice “being with” it. Her job as a facilitator, she says, “isn't to fix, rush, or explain someone's grief, but to help create space for it.”

As for what fills that space, Scott Burd has seen it all: “Sometimes grief arrives as sadness and tears, while other times it shows up as anger, numbness, laughter, gratitude, or love.” If you can allow it all, “something meaningful often begins to unfold.” 

Holding that space requires a deliberate strategy, beyond compassion. Adam O'Neil prepares clients by walking through how much grief and a psilocybin journey have in common: “the difficulties with finding the ‘right’ words, the deep feeling sense, the tension between emotionally holding on with white knuckles [and] the need to release and allow the process to unfold.” 

Clayton Ickes negotiates directly with the psyche, drawing from IFS-style parts work: “I work with grief by forming agreements with the parts who turn away from grief and contracting to actually turn towards and fully feel grief.”

And Denise Vargas has techniques to help clients soften into the experience: “Hypnosis helps [some clients] access a compassionate inner experience of being with their loved one.” In that state, they have “enough presence to say what was never spoken, ask for forgiveness, offer gratitude, or simply receive reassurance that they were loved.”

With grief, there’s no such thing as closure. The pain never fully leaves you, and Michelle Ertl argues you wouldn't want it to: “The depth of the pain is a reflection of the depth of the love.” They’re a package deal, so don’t “let fear of pain strip you of having access to the memory and feeling of all that love.”

A better goal is to learn to live with grief, on purpose. Sophia Catalano uses a helpful metaphor: “To me, grief is like a storm that arrives whether we invite it or not. Over time, we can build a relationship with it rather than continually trying to outrun it.” 

Like all relationships, though, it takes upkeep. Monica Ramunda breaks it down: “The work may include honoring the loved one, making space for unfinished feelings, exploring the continuing bond, and allowing moments of sorrow, love, anger, relief, or meaning to arise without judgment.”

This time, there’s more to the story than “mushrooms make you feel your feelings.”

Yeah, it’s true that facing your emotions instead of running from them is an important part of relating to loss.

But psilocybin’s transcendent or mystical effects play a role here, too.

At the risk of sounding woo, people on psychedelics frequently report feeling connected to something greater than themselves. Some even walk away with a sense that consciousness lives on after the physical body expires.

From that perspective, you don’t have to lose the person at all.

As it relates to grief, researchers actually have a term for this. It’s called “continuing bonds theory,” and it says healthy grieving is ultimately about finding ways to maintain connection to the loved one who passed.

So try to ‘move on’ if you insist. Or, hear us out… you can embrace the woo.

Reply to this email to shoot your shot. If it’s a juicy one, we may select it for a future issue.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.