To begin 2025 I’ll be taking part in a supervised practicum experience with psilocybin. Huh? What’s that?
As part of the instruction to become a licensed Psilocybin Facilitator for the state of Colorado, I will be participating in a practicum/training session where I will be ingesting magic mushrooms (Psilocybe Cubensis). This will be taking place at Inner Trek’s Center for Psilocybin Services in Portland Oregon as part of Colorado’s Accelerated Licensure Program. This experience is a required part of Colorado Psilocybin Facilitator training. The licensure program is being administered by the state of Colorado (DORA) as it debuts its regulated model for legal psilocybin usage in 2025. During my psilocybin journey I will be supported by experienced and licensed Oregon-based Lead Facilitators from Inner Trek, and by my practicum partner, who is also practicing to become a licensed Facilitator in Colorado.
Practicum is not a word that I’ve ever associated with psychedelics. It recalls times from grad school when I was deep in study of esoteric topics which very few people were thinking about. Practicum is about getting out of the textbooks and bringing into tangible reality, with other humans, what we’ve been learning and theorizing about. But this is a very different kind of practicum, because it deals with mindfulness in altered states of consciousness, not hidden corners of academia.
Today we are in a time when psychedelic practices are becoming, by necessity, more widely known and available to larger segments of western culture. I say by necessity because as a nation we now face an epidemic of mental illness, including depression, addiction, anxiety and PTSD, etc. and it’s become clear that big pharma’s for-profit models are not helping us as a population.
While, as a psychedelic session, this experience has potential to be a mind-expanding and transformative experience, it will also be a profound learning experience for myself and those I share it with. It will complement my years of personal experience both leading and participating in medicine experiences with psilocybin. And it will touch on some important questions as it relates to practicing as a Facilitator under the Colorado Regulated Model.
Questions like:
- How do I build trust with people that are going to sit with me during my journey?
- How will space for the journey be created by the Lead Facilitators?
- What amount of psilocybin will be best for me, given the in-depth potency testing data that’s available from the state of Oregon?
- How will I work with my intentions during the experience?
- How will I best be present for and benefit from the post-journey integration process?
- How does this prepare me to serve others as a Psilocybin Facilitator?
I’ll follow up with answers to these questions and more when I return from this exciting psychedelic journey. Stay tuned…
