🫠 Ask a Guide Anything

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter you can squeeze like a stress ball. No microplastics either. 🤌

You know the feeling. After a profound journey, everything seems clear. You've touched something real. Something that matters.

But then life happens. You get a passive-aggressive Slack from your boss at the exact moment your kid’s throwing a tantrum over chicken nuggets. Suddenly those psychedelic downloads feel like a distant memory.

So for today’s newsletter, we asked our network of licensed psilocybin facilitators: What practices can help me maintain connection to psychedelic insights during stressful times?

Here's what they recommend when the chaos creeps back in.

A journey without integration is like filing your taxes and throwing away the refund check.

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Most practitioners point you back to your meat suit. Char McKendrick gets straight to it: “Psychedelic insights aren't meant to be held cognitively alone. They live in the body as felt experience.” When stress hits, she recommends “returning to the breath” and “orienting to present-moment sensations like sounds, sights, and bodily feelings.”

Amy Charlesworth offers a couple tools for your emergency kit: “Take a beat in high-tension moments and count to 100 while taking slow breaths,” or try body scanning by closing your eyes and tuning in “from your head all the way to your toes slowly.” Her explanation hits home: “We can't enjoy the fruits of our psychedelic experiences while our minds and bodies are racing.”

Brenda Davies adds that breathwork “helps regulate my nervous system and reconnect me to the felt sense of clarity and safety.” And Jillian Gordon reminds us it’s okay to have fun: “Being fully in your body through playful movement, dancing, shaking, or just being silly rolling around on the floor can melt away stress.”

You (presumably) set an intention for your journey. What’s stopping you from setting one for your integration? To help you “return to the experience,” Clayton Ickes recommends writing down “an intention statement that represents the core insights of your psychedelic experience” and “reading it while feeling the emotions and sensations at least once per day.”

Melissa Grossman suggests another practice: “Journal about your insights” both after your journey and “while the insights unfold throughout your integration process. That way, when you experience stressful or difficult moments, you can easily refer back to your learnings whenever you'd like.”

Jeremy Nickel frames it differently: “Very small rituals matter most: pausing before a difficult email, feeling my feet on the ground, asking ‘what did I touch in the journey that wants expression now?’”. He also points out the irony of gripping our insights too hard: “Journaling, music, and mindful movement help, but so does kindness toward forgetting.”

Don’t get too attached to the altered state itself. The real goal, according to some of our facilitators, is to make the level of awareness you had on the medicine your new normal. Scott Burd asks: “How would I meet this moment from the place I explored in my journey?”. He reminds us that “integration isn't about staying elevated” but about “remembering how to return.”

Char agrees: “Integration isn't about recreating the state, but practicing meeting life with the same presence, compassion, and curiosity the experience revealed.” Scott adds another perspective shift for difficult moments: “Rather than turning away from what's rising, can I turn toward it with curiosity and explore what it's trying to communicate?”. Life is just a long psychedelic experience, isn’t it.

Jeremy rounds it out with maybe the most compassionate take: “I think of integration less as remembering insights and more as rehearsing a way of being.” And when you inevitably stumble, know that "stress isn't failure. It's the gym. The practice is not clinging to insight, but letting it show up as patience, honesty, and care in ordinary moments.”

Viktor Frankl famously said there's a space between stimulus and response, and in that space lies our freedom.

Don’t know about you, but what we’ve noticed is that psychedelics have a knack for expanding that space. (Maybe that’s why they’re so promising for treating substance use disorders.)

You don’t have to be an addict to live from a place of reactivity, though. We could all stand to act a little less like pinballs bouncing off life’s obstacles and more like conscious, free-willed adults who choose how we show up, no?

So if we can be so bold, we’ll distill all this wisdom down to a single word. Pause. Should we have made that the whole newsletter?

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.