Psychedelic medicine – at any dosage – will be unlike any medicine you’ve ever taken. We call it ‘medicine’, because it is therapeutic, powerful, and helps to heal us in myriad ways. And yet, it is very different from a prescription drug. 

Psychedelics are an entire class of drugs, and psilocybin is a subclass called tryptamines, which are alkaloids derived from the amino acid tryptophan (and act in a similar way – as a prodrug to the synthesis of 5-HTP, a precursor to serotonin).

Indigenous cultures around the world have been working with these substances for thousands of years. They are rich with culture and tradition.

Though we won’t go into further detail here, it is important as we work with this medicine to understand that it carries monumental potential, power, and history.

Fractal Soul splits our therapeutic offerings into three dosage levels – microdoses, low doses and therapeutic macrodoses. Each dose range has different desired outcomes.

For those who have not heard this term, ‘Set’ refers to your own mindset and intention toward your experience. ‘Setting’ refers to your environment during the experience, which can include temperature, music, lighting, warmth, decor, seating, and other people.

Psilocybin, as a classic psychedelic, is a non-specific mental amplifier, which means your journey can be influenced. Setting a positive, healing intention and having a calm mindset going into the experience – along with being in a safe and supportive environment – will help ensure that you achieve your desired outcomes.

Because ‘set and setting’ impact outcomes so dramatically, it is critical to come into the experience with reverence, sacredness, and an optimistic heart. It is also important not to place strict expectations on the experience or outcomes.

Psychedelics are famous for bringing things to the surface which have long lain dormant. If the medicine believes you need to process and release something, it will ask you to. Clients need to be prepared for this. The journey you want isn’t always the journey you get – but it will be the journey you need.

Psilocybin is a powerful medicine and experience. This is one reason we do not offer services to the general public without onboarding and orientation.

Before we guide you through these waters, we want to get to know you as an individual. You are important to us, along with your prior wounds which deserve to be handled with care and tenderness. We will support you in your health and healing goals to the utmost extent we are able.

Enough others have gone before you (millions of people, in fact) and enough of them have documented their experiences, that we have a reasonable idea of what to expect in a psilocybin journey. There are predictable phases of the journey, though what you experience during those phases will of course be highly customized to yourself.

The more prepared you are, the more confident you will feel, and you will bring this confidence and comfort into the journey with you.

Whether microdosing, mid-dosing or therapeutic-dosing, psychedelics will work in your brain, body and soul in different ways. Each experience will be different. Early experiences may have you processing deeply buried trauma. Others may have you enveloped in a deep sense of awe and love. Others may have you experiencing pure joy and giggles, or deep empathy for the human race.

The least helpful thing you can do while taking a psychedelic medicine is reject an invitation from the medicine. If you feel the desire to cry, say aloud ‘I honor the desire to cry’ (even if you don’t initially know why) and then do it. If visions appear of animals, stairways, etc – ask them what they mean. What they’d like to tell you.

This is all part of the letting go of illusion of control, or the repression of that emotion you have kept in place for so very long. There is nothing as healing as full self-acceptance where we no longer feel fragmented or self-judged.

Remember we call this a ‘journey’ for a reason. You cannot take a journey if you are not willing to take the first step.

This specifically applies to psilocybin doses, but really can apply to any life situation as well. Always wanting more is a sign of discontent, a sign we need to look underneath for root causes. It is a sign of extreme-chasing, which we talk about in Our Beliefs under the philosophy of Balance.

Like anything, with psilocybin, the larger dose, the more overwhelming it is. Our facilitators work with clients to guesstimate their dose and get them into the therapeutic ‘sweet spot’ – not overwhelming, but not underwhelming either. Clients can use a ‘booster dose’ if needed about 45-60 minutes in to their journey if they are feeling little effects.

Clients who feel that they need the ‘max dose’ possible may end up drinking from the proverbial cosmic fire hose, and remember very little from their journey. This is a dose level which has gone beyond therapeutic value. Remember, the goal is to heal, to resolve some pain point in your life. A dose that is twice as large is not necessarily twice as good. Psilocybin contains great power, and we need to respect how much our minds and psyches can handle. It is an excellent practice to sit with and deeply explore the amount of medicine that you are given – even relatively small amounts of medicine can be profoundly healing when fully explored.

Do not treat your dose like a sledgehammer – psilocybin requires your participation to be effective.

After your experience, hopefully you came away with some profound insights – like dozens of light bulb aha moments.

What do you do with that, though? This is where Integration comes in. Integration is the practice of figuring out what to bring in to your daily life, how, and when. It is a complex topic that deserves much more than this short mention – but please take the integration phase of your program seriously. Your brain will be in a plasticized, malleable and suggestible state for the first couple of weeks after your psilocybin session. This is an excellent window to reprogram old harmful thoughts and habits, replacing them with new more helpful thoughts and coping mechanisms.

Please speak with your Facilitator about specific Integration practices for you. They will listen without judgment to what you have experienced and help you sort out meaning and application.