OREGON PSILOCYBIN THERAPY
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Oregon has legalized psilocybin therapy, and anyone over 21 can apply for them! But it’s not your typical recreational trip. It can be life-changing, and it’s already rocking the mental health world.
In July of 2023, someone legally took psilocybin for the first time in the US in over 5 decades! Most people in the US have yet to realize how important of a step this is. Mushrooms could help so many people affected by the crazy reality we’re immersed in and affected by, both communally and individually.
In this, I’ll explore the steps for psilocybin services, the “mystical experience,” how most psilocybin therapy is more about facilitation of the medicine, why groups are a great way to go, how integration may be more important than the actual medicine session, and how a journey through Oregon’s incredible nature can enhance your psychedelic experience!
Oregon's Psilocybin Services
While you can now legally take psilocybin mushrooms in Oregon, this is no regular, eat shrooms at a party with your friends type of trip. It’s intentional, therapeutic use with a focus on healing and mental health. As helpful as that is, even that may be a limited perspective (more on that later).
But you can’t just go to Oregon, buy a bag of Psilocybin Cubensis from your local shroom shop, and eat them in your McMenniman’s hotel room. It was legalized in a way to help you go through a more intentional and safer psychedelic mushroom experience, with a focus on healing and growth. Holding intention around the psychedelic experience, as well as having a facilitator for the journey, makes a difference.
The steps of this process, both legally in Oregon and for professional facilitation more broadly, are the initial consultation (or exploration call or form), preparation, administration (the medicine session), and integration.
Initial Consultation
The first thing we want to do is make sure you’re in a good space for this type of journey. Unfortunately, it’s not for everyone, or it may not the right time. We don’t want to cause anyone harm, and you legally have to be 21 or older.
It’s also important that you make sure you’ve got the right person to go on your journey with. If you’re joining a group, make sure that fit feels right as well.
To sort all this out, the first step is to contact us for a free exploration call. It’s about a 20 minute call, and a licensed facilitator will then reach out about your preparation session, either in person or over a video call.
Rapport with your licensed facilitator
You will probably navigate some deep things during your journey, so it’s important to pick the person who will be there with you through the process mindfully. Thus you’ll want to consider the rapport you have with your facilitator.
It’s good to listen to your intuition here. If you feel the fit is off during the preparation stage, you can change it up. Both us facilitators and you want the same thing: for you to have a deeply impactful experience. That sometimes means you going in a different direction for that to happen. And that’s fine.
After your initial consultation, and the fit seems right, you’ll move on to a full preparation session.
Preparation Session
Psychedelic experiences can be some of the most profound moments of people’s lives. So it makes sense that you don’t just show up on Tuesday, eat some magic mushrooms, and your whole life is completely changed on Wednesday. It is, after all, a journey. The better prepared you are, the better you are able to move through it.
The minimum requirement for Oregon psilocybin services is one hour long preparation session. You answer a bunch of questions about yourself, and your licensed facilitator works with you to explore your answers. We then give some guidelines around the experience, offer some reflections, and create agreements around how we move forward if we do. We’re big on group journeys here, and if you go that route we also offer a virtual introduction session so you can see if that fit feels right.
The other part of preparation is how you prepare personally.
Personal Preparation
Your personal preparation matters. How will you limit psychic toxicity prior to your journey? Will you make shifts in diet, the people who have access to you, limit your screen time, talk to a therapist (I strongly recommend exploring this, especially someone with a psychedelic-integrated practice.) How will you practice self-care? All of that makes a difference.
Clearing blockages in the body can also help. Make it a point to practice yoga or ramp up your practice. Get a massage soon before your journey (my personal favorite).
Of course, altering your environment helps too. Find places that bring you peace. For me, there’s no place that does that like the natural world, so spend as much time as possible in nature beforehand. If you can, have a preparation session with your facilitator in nature. We like to offer at least one session like this.
Psilocybin Session in a Licensed Service Center
The psilocybin session, aka the administration session (or what we like to call the “medicine session”), you eat the mushrooms and take a psychedelic trip. This currently can only legally be done in a designated psilocybin service center that meets several requirements, according to the Oregon Health Authority.
You may already know about the myriad mental health conditions that psilocybin services can help people with, including severe anxiety, alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, end-of-life difficulties, and more. It has even been recognized by the FDA as a breakthrough therapy for both major depressive disorder and treatment-resistant depression. You also get to have an often enjoyable and always insightful trip!
While there are many outcomes, and all journeys hold their medicine, one thing more consistently leads to powerful change: the elusive “mystical experience.”
The Life-Changing "Mystical Experience"
Mystical experiences and perception-shifting “visions” are at the heart of psychedelic lore, and a vital piece of my personal journey. This is a state of pure consciousness characterized by an overwhelming sense of connection or union with something larger than oneself.
Common aspects of mystical experiences include transcending physical and perceptual limitations, a deep sense of awe and wonder, a feeling of sacred consciousness, tangible intuitive knowledge, paradoxicality, and ineffability. In short, it isn’t easy to describe in words. If you want to hear the difference, check out this podcast of an 88-year-old woman before and after her first mystical experience.
Research is beginning to show that those who report having a mystical experience during their psychedelic journey have a high correlation with positive outcomes. While having these can never be guaranteed, our nature-based journeys are designed to open you up to them as much as possible. They provide the perfect “set and setting” for your journey to unfold.
Whether you are graced with a mystical experience or not, you will almost certainly experience something meaningful that will set you further along your journey. Integration is vital to helping you bring back whatever you find into your everyday world.
Integration Sessions
Let’s say you go out and have an incredible, perception-altering experience. You now understand your life and the entire universe differently. Exploring this experience thoroughly and bringing it back into your everyday life is the difficult work of integration.
One of the many magic tricks of these little mushrooms is “neuroplasticity.” People like to compare your post-mushroom mind to a field of freshly fallen snow on which you’re about to ski on. Side note, I can’t tell you how much I personally love that analogy. Anyway, all of your old “tracks,” i.e. habits, emotional reactions, perceptions, awareness, it’s all been snowed over. But, being the skier of life you are, you’re about to make some new ones. Now, for some reason, the skier in question tends to stay in those tracks, which if you’re a powder hound like me, is where the analogy falls apart a bit. Maybe a creek would be a better analogy? At any rate, start carving your groove in the places you would like to go more often.
First, you want at least a day to sit with all of it afterward. During the journey, you’re flooded with visions, emotions and insights. You THINK you’ll remember every detail while it’s happening because it feels so intuitive. But that’s not really how things like this work. So take some time to before you jump back into your everyday life. Journal about it. And later use that journal for reference, especially during moments of questioning. And of course, it helps to be in nature to free your mind of distractions and holds you in that interconnected space.
Then, after that initial time of reflection, you’ll want to implement changes in your life stemming from your awareness. That’s the tough part.
Healthy Integration
It’s important that you don’t just jump straight from what you see to changing your whole life around to align with your visions, which is a common desire. The people who jump into it too quickly can become a cautionary tale for others. No matter how the journey unfolded, you were shown something in liminal space. Navigating this in the real world takes moving through physical and cultural parameters, complex relationships, nuance, timing, and more.
On the other end of the spectrum, people can also be too cautious, ignore, or put the things they saw on the back burner. They simply go about life the same way as before, even though their perceptual foundation has shifted. They wait for the right time to implement changes, as the feeling of it all slowly fades. Your journey is active and always unfolding according to how you respond.
People tend to let their experiences turn into a memory, putting their dreams at the bottom of an overloaded “to-do” list. They quickly slide off the bottom of that list. They miss the opportunities that arise from them happening, waiting until enough happens to make real change.
Proper integration helps you evolve with both your vision and your life. Living into what you find opens you up to even more incredible things that just wouldn’t be possible if you didn’t do this important work.
The Oregon Health Authority and the psilocybin advisory board agreed that people have at least one hour-long session. But that’s not very close to how I see things.
An Alternate Psychedelic Journey Timeline
People tend to assume that just having the trip is the bulk of the experience. The psilocybin facilitation world has come to a consensus of sorts, that integration is at least 50% of the process, around 25% of the journey is preparation, and only 25% is the magic mushrooms administration session. Of course everyone sees it differently, including myself.
While offering psilocybin facilitation is newer for me, I have been facilitating nature-based transformational journeys for years. I have also had a number of mystical experiences brought on by psychedelics and other altered states since my teens. And I’ve been seeking ways to understand and bring these states forward since I first encountered them.
With that, here’s my take on this timeline:
Preparation (3+ Days)
I recommend beginning your preparation at least a few days out. Find a therapist. Do the intake form, and find the right facilitator.
Also, for as long as you can, get into a self-care practice. Eat more mindfully. Journal. Work through some of your stuff so all of that is easier to navigate during your actual psychedelic journey. Find joy and appreciation in your life. Limit toxicity however it comes at you.
While all of that is self-paced, you should put far more time into that than you’ll spend in the psychedelic mushroom session.
Medicine Session (1 Day)
The actual administration only lasts about four to six hours. But it can feel like a timeless experience. How you prepare, and then navigate through that space, along with how much you let the magic mushrooms guide you, shapes this session. Your facilitator will offer reflection, and hold the space for your journey to unfold, but it’s your journey.
The things you see during this time could shift the foundation of how you see everything, including your own life. But seeing things differently doesn’t help you in the long run if you don’t make changes to align with that.
Integration (Ongoing)
With any luck, you’ll find something that puts you on a different path for the rest of your life. It continues to grow and evolve as you do. That’s true integration. That will take far more than 50% of your time, energy, or anything else. That said, the first few days after you hit the cranial reset button is the time when you want to make new habits.
This is where we at Mushroomeric really stand out from most other psilocybin services. Our nature-based journeys are spent mostly in the integration portion of your psilocybin journey. This allows you to engage with the natural world while you see things in new ways. You’re already open to this universal intelligence, and by being here you allow it to flow where it lives and breathes.
You can also interact with other journeyers in your group who are going through the same thing. Sharing this experience while you’re going through it can create strong bonds and tie it into the interpersonal realm..
After you get back home, you’ll get one integration session with your facilitator, as you would with most services. You also get a group integration session online. Plus you can stay connected with both the group and a broader community on our sister site’s community page, free for life.
Nature Based Journeys
If there’s one substance people should use in conjunction with nature, it’s psychedelic mushrooms. Service centers are primarily indoors and in contained environments, which is what the law currently holds them to. But you can still bring nature in with you, and sink into it afterward with our nature-based psilocybin therapy journeys.
Connection with nature before your psilocybin therapy session will get you out of your everyday mindset and help you open to that feeling of connection to everything. That’s a strong piece of the mystical experience.
In the natural world, you’ll undoubtedly have moments and encounters that bring forward the stuff you’re working through. Your fears and things you’ve been avoiding will come to the surface a bit more, but subtly. You may be able to see them in an entirely different context. You find presence with the experience and open up to the depths of yourself in a way you can’t easily find anywhere else.
After the medicine session, people often have a new appreciation for everything. Exploring this new openness in a natural environment full of living things can set your course in an entirely different direction. This is where the beauty and peace of the outdoors, especially here in Oregon, can really sink in.
Nature-based journeys are far too involved to be practical or affordable for individual psilocybin journeys. So we currently only offer these types of experiences in groups, either open or private.
If you take psilocybin, whether you do a nature-based journey or not, we recommend doing it in a group.
Group Psilocybin Sessions
Group psilocybin sessions can be powerful, and worth considering for a number of reasons. The first is apparent; cost.
The psilocybin journey is expensive. Splitting the cost of the service center and the facilitator’s time on the day of the journey saves each person a good bit of money.
That said, the thought of journeying on mushrooms with a bunch of people you don’t know can understandably cause hesitation. To help with this, we offer a few ways to ease your concern.
Once you sign up for a journey, you can opt into a group chat on our website. We’ll also hold an online meeting with everyone to gauge if the group fit is right. It’s worth considering that the people who gravitate towards this style of journey may be the exact type of people you want to know better, especially after going through something like this.
People have been engaging in psychedelic rituals communally for generations, and there’s a certain element of magic in that. Even doing this in a group, though, your experience with magic mushrooms will largely be a personal one. But you “come back” to a community of people who also went through a deeply profound moment as well. Sharing your journey and integration in community builds strong real-world bonds.
Plus, you’ll have access to our community afterward. You can continue to connect with folks, and explore other circles in our online community, and they can lead to getting together in the physical world, too.
If you’re doing all this to make a shift in yourself and in the world, having a supportive community can make a huge difference!
Get Started On Your Journey!
Fill out this form and a licensed facilitator will be in touch shortly.
Is It Psilocybin Therapy?
Psilocybin therapy is a highly searched term, so I used it a lot. But psilocybin therapy, and mental health therapy in general, vs facilitation, is quite different.
I heard Dr. Bill Plotkin call himself a “recovering therapist” during my yearlong journey with him, and that stuck with me. He founded Animas Valley Institute, which guides nature-based underworld journeys, or the decent to soul.
The difference between a therapist and a facilitator or guide is real. Western models of psychotherapy follow the Western medical model in that it starts with a problem or issue. Your issue (or increasingly often, your child’s). So you go see a professional or an expert about this issue. They then tell you about this issue, and how to treat it so, as the saying goes, you can become a “functioning member of society.”
James Hillman’s book “We’ve Had 100 Years of Therapy — and the World Is Getting Worse” (written 30 years ago now) highlights the limitations of modern therapy. You can read about my journey in the world of psychology here and the difference between facilitating a connection with wild nature vs. the therapeutic approach here.
I want to clarify that seeing a therapist can absolutely be helpful for insight, reflection, connection, sharing your story with someone engaged and empathetic, and more. Those who are psychologically unstable or excessively nervous about this may want to consider psychedelic-informed therapy (a much longer and more intimate process) and consider individual facilitation with someone who has lots of experience with your personal issues.
vs. Psilocybin Facilitation
Facilitation recognizes each person as their own expert, who holds the key to their own healing, wholing, finding balance, or moving forward in their journey. Your intentions play a part, as does what mystery has in store for you. We don’t tell you what that means. Rather, we hold space for the relationship between you and the medicine and the larger mysteries of the universe, to flourish.
All facilitators hold space in their own way, but one key aspect is simply witnessing and reflecting back their experience. Our main role is to hold a safe and expansive space for your journey.
Most of what you will find with Oregon’s psilocybin services is facilitation, despite “psilocybin therapy” being a highly searched term. The best way to move forward with all of this is to talk with at least one facilitator offering their services, sit with your interactions, and find someone who feels right to navigate this space with.
It's Not For Everyone
Unfortunately, psilocybin isn’t the best approach for everyone. Neither we nor you want to have an experience that harms you or causes regression. Those with a history of severe trauma or mental health issues, especially those who are prone to severe breaks from reality, should be cautious, at least, and honest about their history. There can also be conflicts with certain medications.
Not being able to partake in this experience could be disappointing, but rarely the end of the story. It may just take more time and patience, work in preparation, or even an alternate journey first. That’s better for everyone than having a negative outcome.
But It Could Be Just What You Need
If you align with our approach, reach out and we’ll be in touch soon.