Psychedelics Aren’t a Shortcut: Why Preparation and Integration Matter

We live in a culture that worships the quick fix.

We want instant results.
Immediate healing.
One ceremony to clear all the trauma.
One trip to meet God and come back changed forever.

And to be clear—psychedelics can be utterly life-changing.
They can awaken something deep and ancient.
They can remind us of who we really are beneath the layers of pain, fear, and forgetting.

But without support before, during, and after, they can also leave us unanchored, confused, overwhelmed, and more disconnected than when we started.

Because psychedelic experiences don’t happen in a vacuum.
They happen in the body.
In a culture.
In a nervous system.
In a life that likely wasn’t built to hold the kind of spiritual or emotional unraveling that they can catalyse.

The Myth of the One-Time Cure

Some people are drawn to psychedelics hoping for a cure and understandably so.
When you’ve carried pain for years, when traditional approaches haven’t helped, when nothing else has worked, it makes sense to hope that this might be the thing that finally shifts everything.

But healing isn’t a one-night event.
It’s a layered, complex, and often non-linear journey.
Psychedelics might open the door but walking through it is where the work really begins.

And yet we see it all the time:
No preparation.
No intention.
No context.
Just a desire to break through or be “fixed.”

But you can’t shortcut the soul.

Spiritual Awakenings Can Feel Like Crises

We rarely talk about how destabilising awakening can be.
We celebrate peak experiences—light, bliss, love, oneness but what happens when someone comes back and can’t make sense of what they’ve seen?

What happens when old trauma rises fast and hot to the surface?
What happens when the veil thins and they have no framework, no guide, no support to help them integrate it?

In a world that doesn't speak the language of spirit, altered states are often pathologised.
In many western psychiatric systems, there’s no space for mystical experiences.
They’re misread as mania. Delusion. Psychosis.

I once did a training on how to support someone through a psychedelic crisis. A psychotherapist shared a story about being called into a hospital—one with a strong Catholic foundation. A patient had taken a large dose of psychedelics and reported “meeting God.”

The psychiatrist on duty was a devout Catholic.

You’d think, of all people, he might hold space for that kind of experience. But instead, he insisted it was impossible. That what the patient had encountered couldn’t be real.

He wanted to have them sectioned.

The irony still strikes me: here was someone whose entire faith tradition is built on the belief in divine encounter—and yet when someone actually experienced it, outside of doctrine and dogma, it was instantly pathologised.

This is the kind of contradiction that lives in our culture. We say we believe in the soul, in spirit, in mystery but we don’t know how to hold it when it shows up unfiltered, unscheduled, or inconvenient.

And meanwhile, we see the opposite distortion happening in the media.

Headlines that say: “Psilocybin cures depression in a single dose.”
“LSD may rewire the brain.”
“New research shows psychedelics heal trauma faster than therapy.”

It’s framed as a miracle cure. A magic bullet. A quick fix.

But what’s often missing is nuance.

Healing is not just about neurochemistry. Psychedelics aren’t just "rewriting the script" in the brain, they’re bringing people into contact with their deepest pain, their unlived grief, their repressed rage, their fractured sense of self. And for that to be truly healing, it needs context. Care. Safety. Integration.

Without that, we risk retraumatising people instead of supporting them. We risk opening doors we’re not prepared to help people walk through.

What We Need Is a New Culture of Care

We need more than access to psychedelics.
We need safe containers. Skilled facilitators. Trauma-aware support. Integration circles. Nervous system literacy. Community.

We need people who understand that a 6-hour journey can open a 6-month portal.
And that what happens after the ceremony is just as important as what happens during it.

We need to move from consuming medicine to relating to it.
From chasing highs to honouring the deep, slow work of healing.

This Isn’t About Shame—It’s About Love

If you’ve had a difficult journey, or gone into an experience unprepared, please know this:
You are not broken.
You are not naive.
You are not alone.

Most of us weren’t given the tools to understand what this path really demands.
We weren’t taught how to hold ourselves through unraveling.
We weren’t shown how to tend to the soul.

This is why I do the work I do.
Not to gatekeep psychedelics but to protect the sacred.
To create containers that are safe, slow, embodied, and grounded in care.

So that when the door opens, you don’t have to walk through it alone.
And when you meet God, your body is ready to receive the message.
And when your trauma comes to the surface, there’s enough love in the room to hold it.

Psychedelics aren’t the healing.
They’re the invitation.

Integration is the healing.
Relationship is the healing.
Being seen, held, and slowly becoming yourself again—that’s the healing.

Let’s build a world that knows how to hold people through it all.