Microdosing as Preparation & Integration of your Sacred Medicine Retreat
"It was amazing. Profound. Beyond even my ample expectations. But after I got home - after a few weeks - I noticed the window started to close. The magic began to fade. So I'd love to begin microdosing as a way to kindle and tend that fire, to extend my experience and expansion into the fabric of my daily life and relationships."
Over the last five years I've supported over a thousand individuals in their microdosing practice, and this year - more than ever - people are coming to practice both to prepare for as well as integrate ceremonial journeys like my client above. Intentional microdosing prior to and following ceremony creates an arc of experience - a container within which to hold and integrate your experience - especially when done with the support, nourishment and safety of a guide and community.
Laying the Foundation
Booking your sacred medicine retreat is an exciting moment, and in many ways signals to spirit that your journey is already underway! For many, their psilocybin journey will rank among the most meaningful experiences of their life; I love to hear when people select a destination retreat for their ceremony as it means they are bringing great attention - and intention - to this life-changing experience. Preparation and laying a strong foundation are such an important part of your retreat experience, and creating an intentional microdosing practice - taking small, sub-perceptual does of earth medicines - leading up to your retreat can enhance your outcomes immeasurably.
Your psilocybin journey has every potential to be one of the most profound experiences of your life, and you can begin to cultivate and invite the experience in by developing a relationship with the medicine in the months leading up to your retreat. Think of it this way: imagine you've booked a ten-day silent meditation retreat this summer, but you've never meditated before. If you begin meditating today - even for just twenty minutes a day - you will be much better prepared to sit in silence for ten days straight! Microdosing is quite similar - it's an opportunity to experience the medicine in small, bite-sized, subtle ways before heading into a more intense, all-encompassing experience.
Microdosing over the course of days and weeks will reveal threads and clues to help shape and inform your intentions for your journey. Emotions and memories will arise, dreams may offer symbols and guidance, and your microdosing guide & community can help witness and reflect the wisdom the medicine is offering you. You'll develop a familiarity with the medicine, recognize its communication & voice, and how it uniquely engages with your individual mind, body and spirit. Natural earth medicines have a distinct ability to speak to - and through - each of us in a way that is most aligned for our spirit; some of us may experience the medicine through our physical bodies, while others through their dreams, emotions, or even signs from natural world and animal kingdom.
In my witnessing, the amount of fear, heavy energy and dense resonances one holds in the auric and physical body will often inform their journey experience. In my experience, most "bad trips" could be more accurately defined by little to no preparation or relationship with the medicine going into their journey; without self-awareness or knowledge, a Pandora's box of unexamined trauma, guilt, fear or shame held in the body or psyche can surface all at once. Initiating ourselves gently with microdosing can begin to shine a light on our patterns and fears, easing them to the surface to be worked with prior to a more immersive and revealing journey experience.
Guided microdosing as preparation can help you shed and release fear from the body - often experienced as grief, feelings of sorrow and cathartic tears - to purify, lighten and cleanse your energy. As you enjoy a deeper self-trust and confidence with the medicine, many people notice a diminished sense of fear or anxiety around their upcoming journey. Worry is replaced by curiosity and anticipation about what the journey will share, teach and reveal... often an amplified form of the subtle messages whispered in your microdosing practice.
Microdosing as part of your preparation is deeply empowering, and you'll embark on your retreat knowing in an embodied way that your journey is a thoughtful dance, an intentional relationship, and that all the preparation you've done will blossom in the journey itself. I have witnessed again and again in our community, when people lay the foundation of practice with microdosing their journey experience becomes an extension and expresssion of that beautiful preparation... Nature rewards our efforts, intentions and devotion to our growth, evolution and maturity.
Honoring & Integrating your Journey
After the majestic, often-ineffable experience of a ceremonial retreat, it can be quite a transition to return to 'regular life.' Once you experience the glory of divinity, glimpse eternity, are shown great wisdom, and held in radiant, loving source energy it can be hard landing to go back to folding socks and paying taxes. Integrating these powerful experiences into our everyday lives is the practical magic of earth medicines - harnessing the experience to deepen our earthly relationships, nurture our connection to our bodies and the planet, increase our empathy and compassion, create and appreciate beauty, and become more long-seeing servant-leaders of the future.
While many of us are motivated to prepare and instill ritual in our lives in the weeks leading up to our retreat, it can be challenging to remember and recreate the connection to the sacred - to keep the channel to spirit strong and open - once we've returned home. This is where microdosing can be an essential part of our integration - a practice to stay connected to nature, to continue holding spirit close, to nurture the new neuroplasticity, to create meaningful ritual, and further build upon the fresh openness the experience has bestowed upon us.
We honor the gifts of the medicine with our subsequent embodiment - by choosing to align ourselves with its teachings and truly walk the medicine path in our daily lives: by being more compassionate, intentional, wise, kind, humble, generous and peaceful. Alongside the new expansiveness and flexibility we receive, the post-retreat window is the perfect time to introduce new healthy habits, contribute our unique gifts, form supportive relationships, express ourselves creatively, and bring more meaning and beauty to our lives in a real and lasting way.
As the Zen proverb shares, "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." Microdosing and weaving the medicine's wisdom into our everyday lives is the 'chop wood/carry water' part of the medicine path, and a practice that - over time - becomes less a practice we do and more of, simply, who we are. It helps us embed and instill the fresh awarenesses a ceremonial journey offers into a lasting way of life and being, and serves as the quiet, gentle, devoted practice that - with time - becomes a formidable calm strength that underpins our lives.
Ready to begin? Our Global Microdosing Community is the ideal way to explore practice alongside kindred spirits from around the world. Learn more HERE - begin today!
