How to Find a Psychedelic Integration Coach in Oregon (2024)
Psychedelic therapy is now legal in Oregon. Whether you’re looking for a psychedelic integration coach in Portland, OR or elsewhere, there are some important considerations to make before your psychedelic experience to ensure that you will have a safe and maximally beneficial experience.
Benefits of Working With a Psychedelic Integration Coach
Psychedelics have historically been used in communities for healing, exploring spirituality, pro-social connection, and celebrating transitions.
Today, people are utilizing them for these purposes as well, but we lack the culturally-vetted structures surrounding them, and so many people are not sure how to engage with these substances in the safest and most effective ways.
The most common mistake people make when working with psychedelic substances is lacking the ongoing support necessary for ongoing change.
Without proper integration work, many people will find difficulty in making the changes related to the intention they entered their psychedelic experience with.
Without proper integration, a return to your normal environment will often bring with it a return of the defenses and symptoms you turned to psychedelics to alleviate.
These substances are powerful and potentially psychologically harmful. Therefore, they must be treated with reverence, intention, and responsibility.
A difficult psychedelic experience that is left unresolved could result in the emergence of repressed traumatic memories.
Frequent use of psychedelics without integration can have an unbalancing effect that can end up hindering more than it helps.
Furthermore, proper integration begins before the experience is even undertaken.
In anticipation of a psychedelic experience, lack of proper preparation can cause undesired adverse effects (e.g. not knowing the full effects of the substance, not setting proper intentions, not entering the experience from a stable position).
Having a psychedelic integration coach will allow you to deepen your understanding of your psychedelic experience.
Your coach can help you navigate the difficult task of merging the grandeur of the psychedelic experience with the ordinariness of daily life.
With psychedelic integration coaching, you will be able to maintain the positive benefits of the experience, and even integrate challenging or intrusive thoughts and feelings.
Through working with a psychedelic integration coach, you will learn how to:
Affirm your insights and derive actionable steps to manifest the existence you want to be living
Trust your intuition and “Inner Healing Intelligence”
Reduce potential harms
Maximize psychological and physical benefits from the experience
Maintain changes and resist falling backward into unhelpful or self-destructive patterns
If you choose to work with psychedelics for your mental health, spiritual growth, or enjoyment of life, it is best to reduce the risks and maximize the benefits by working with a professional psychedelic integration coach.
How to Find the Right Psychedelic Integration Coach in Portland, Oregon, or Anywhere in the World
As you are likely well aware, psychedelics are incredibly powerful modalities for transformation.
If you are considering working with a psychedelic guide or tripsitter, you certainly are going to carefully vet the candidate to ensure that there exists the presence of felt safety, mutual respect, deep expertise, adaptability, and nonjudgmental holding.
When choosing a psychedelic integration coach to work with, these same considerations should be at the forefront of your decision-making.
Here are some ways to know that the person you’re considering is the right psychedelic integration coach for you to work with:
Your inner knowing tells you it’s the right person. As with any psychological work, trusting your intuition is the core component for knowing that you’re moving in the right direction. The psychedelic space is no different. Your deep self understands what it is you need, and it will communicate that to you in subtle and obvious ways. By learning to trust your intuitive sense, you will find your way to the right psychedelic integration specialist.
Your coach has sound answers to difficult questions. A sign of expertise is the ability of someone to demonstrate a broad, deep, and precise knowledge base extemporaneously. Your psychedelic integration coach should be able to answer challenging and even obscure questions that you might have about the psychedelic experience. Of course, humility is a virtue worth celebrating, and an honest answer of “I don’t know” can inform your choice much more than a convoluted answer aspiring to portray an expertise that is not there.
Your coach has been working with psychedelics him/herself for at least several years. As the psychedelic renaissance unfurls, many psychedelically-naive people will enter the space of offering services around psychedelic usage. Unfortunately, this will mean that people who have had only one or a few experiences will take on the title of psychedelic integration specialist and advertise their services. Having a lack of experience is not a bad thing for someone exploring psychedelics for their own healing and transformation, but if someone inexperienced takes on the posture of a specialist without having had the requisite experience him/herself, their service will likely be unhelpful at best, and at worst, harmful. Ask your coaching candidates about their own experience with psychedelics to get a better sense of where they are in their own journeys.
Your coach can provide testimonials or references. It is true for any service or product that a large sample of genuine positive testimonials or personal references is a great sign. It is especially true when dealing in such a delicate domain as the realm of psychedelic work.
You feel no pressure or manipulative sales tactics. Because psychedelics are substances that can be considered sacred, manipulative sales tactics belong nowhere near them. If your prospective coach seems to be being deceitful or creating a false sense of urgency to commit to working with you, rest assured that there are plenty of ethical, patient, and understanding psychedelic integration coaches out there for you to explore working with. This decision should come from a knowing in your heart, and not a sense of false urgency.
There are of course many other guidelines that can prove useful in helping you find the right psychedelic integration coach; we hope these five guidelines empower you to make the right decision for yourself.
If you are ready to begin working with a psychedelic integration coach, you can contact the professional coaches here at Texture Coaching & Integration for a free, no-pressure call to answer whatever questions you may have.
