Standing at the Threshold
When people sit with me and talk about an upcoming psychedelic retreat, there is often a very particular light in their eyes: the look of someone standing at the edge of something that feels both terrifying and sacred.
They say that they cannot keep living the way they are; they explain that they need this; they share that they want to be more present for their partner, their children, or their community. In my experience, the vast majority of people who travel for psychedelic journeys are not doing so to escape or to chase novelty; rather, they are travelling with the very best intentions. They want to heal; they want to feel whole; they want to become the kind of people who can contribute to a better world instead of simply surviving in a broken one.
Intention: Necessary but Not Sufficient
Those intentions are deeply important, because they guide how we prepare, how we move through a ceremony, and how we make sense of what we experience afterward. However, over time, I have come to see that intention is only one part of the story; it is necessary, yet not sufficient. In many psychedelic spaces, we constantly talk about setting an intention, as if that practice alone anchors the work, while we speak far less about the web of relationships that every journey is woven into.
These include relationships with:
- – the medicines themselves,
- – the land that holds the work,
- – Indigenous or local communities,
- – our own lineages, families, and ecological systems.
When intention is not grounded in relationship, it can slide, almost invisibly, into the very mindset that created so much of our pain in the first place: a subtle, spiritualised form of consumption in which we go somewhere, take something, have an experience, and then move on.
The Western Pattern of Seeking
In the West, many of us arrive at psychedelics after years, or sometimes decades, of a familiar cycle of seeking. We feel lonely, numb, anxious, or burned out, and the culture around us repeatedly teaches that the answer lies in more:
- – more achievement and productivity
- – more stimulation and experience
- – more purchasing and self-improvement
When that pattern eventually fails, as it usually does, we are given diagnoses and prescriptions with little attention to the relational, cultural, and historical conditions shaping our distress. Against that backdrop, a trip to the jungle or a retreat centre can feel like a lifeline.
See my Partnership with Modern Growth Medicine – an integrative, psychedelic-informed organization focused on safe, ethical, and evidence-based approaches to non-ordinary states and psychedelic-assisted care.
Journeys Happen in a Web of Relationships
However, those journeys do not occur in a vacuum; they unfold within a complex and layered field of relationships. The medicines we work with—mushrooms, cacti, vines, or molecules—all exist in specific ecosystems, tended and harvested by particular people and traditions. The retreat centres are built on particular lands with their own histories of use, ownership, dispossession, and resistance.
Even our ability to travel for healing is shaped by money, mobility, free time, and safety—resources distributed unevenly. If we frame a journey only around what we intend to receive, we fail to recognise the larger relational field we are stepping into.
Psychedelics as Teachers of Interconnection
Again and again, people describe psychedelic experiences in which their sense of separateness dissolves. They feel themselves as part of a forest or an ocean; they sense their bodies as made of the same matter as the stars; they feel ancestors standing behind them and descendants ahead of them.
These moments loosen the illusion that we are solitary, self-contained beings. They reveal that our lives are strands in a larger fabric, nested inside families, cultures, ecosystems, and timelines we did not design.
From Intention to Relationship
If we take these experiences seriously, they begin to have consequences and invite us into responsibilities. The focus shifts from asking what we want from the journey to asking what we are entering into—and what the experience may be asking from us in return.
Our healing becomes less of a private possession and more of a shared responsibility.
Relational Wounds, Relational Healing
The injuries that bring people to psychedelics—neglect, shame, abandonment, cultural abuse, dislocation from ancestry or land—did not arise in isolation. They arrived through relationships or the absence of healthy relationships.
Integration requires ongoing relational work:
- – how we treat our bodies daily
- – how we handle conflict with partners, friends, and colleagues
- – how we participate in or withdraw from community
- – how we relate to the land we inhabit
Privilege, Ethics, and Accountability
Questions around privilege and ethics naturally emerge. Many modern psychedelic spaces draw directly from Indigenous traditions, often in communities that have endured colonisation, extraction, and ecological disruption.
Mature relationships ask us to be honest about power and impact:
- – Who benefits economically?
- – Who carries risk?
- – How are traditional knowledge holders honoured or erased?
- – Are we showing up as guests/students or as consumers expecting customization?
Our intentions become more complete—not wrong—when we grapple with these questions.
Integration: Where Insight Becomes Action
The ceremony lasts hours; integration lasts years. After a journey, I often invite people to reflect on how life is now asking them to move differently. This might include conversations they can no longer avoid, boundaries they must set or soften, patterns of harm or inequity they’re now awake to, or practical shifts in how they invest time, money, and attention.
Using Privilege to Build Something Closer to Home
For those with the means to attend retreats, there is an opportunity within that privilege. The same resources that support travel can also support local psychedelic therapy initiatives, indigenous-led projects and deeper relationship with the land they actually live on.
We can help build the kinds of community we keep leaving home to find.
When Intention Ripens Into Devotion
If we stay with this path long enough, intention becomes devotion. Intention says we want to heal; devotion says we are willing to be changed in service of something larger. Devotion keeps us in relationship when the work is not convenient or glamorous.
Healing as a Living Ecosystem
Intention is the seed; relationship is the soil, water, and climate that help it grow. Healing becomes holistic when it includes not only individual pain, but also the systems we are part of, the histories we inherit, the land that sustains us, and the communities we touch.
The psychedelic movement holds enormous potential, not for spectacular experiences, but because it can help us remember belonging. If our journeys lead us back into honest, accountable, loving relationships, then the medicines are doing their work.
The Invitation
The invitation is to allow psychedelics to move us from intention alone into a lifelong practice of relationship: with ourselves, with one another, and with the living world we are already inextricably part of.
