Psychedelic-assisted Coaching, VI – Protocols ($)

A little insight into the psychedelic experience.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
— Abraham Lincoln, President

In this series, I distinguished therapy from coaching. This division reflects a dichotomy in how therapy is defined and how psychedelics are approached. Dividing people into a disabled class that needs help and an enabled class that needs encouragement is limited and unrealistic.

In the fifth installment, I suggest a more connected interaction between a facilitator and client. Here I propose a protocol for a psychedelic journey that expands on this idea.

The few readers who are going to take a chemically induced psychedelic journey will not remember what I say here if I am too abstract. And most of my readers who are not planning to journey may find my comments irrelevant if I speak in detail.

My ideas for a psychedelically assisted protocol apply to a few psychedelic practitioners and those creating a new container for their psychedelic journey. That demographic is looking for new thinking, and while many are interested, few are exploring new protocols.

The old protocol for taking psychedelics, which remains largely the only protocol, could be summarized by saying, “Get comfortable and have a nice time.” Given that we’re talking about a fundamentally mind expanding experience, this is incredibly lacking in direction or engagement.

The reason we have such lame indications for conducting a psychedelic experience is that we have little basis for mind expanding experiences‌. Most people who head off on an adventure of any kind do nothing more than pack a lunch. It’s because we have no experience in managing altered states of mind that we neither offer nor accept guidance in the psychedelic realm.