What Top Psychedelic Facilitator Trainings Get Right, and Wrong

And why almost nobody is doing psychedelic ceremonies correctly...

Hey lovey bunnies!❤️‍🩹

I know that some of you are already facilitating psychedelic ceremonies, or might do so in the future, while others of you may be thinking about joining one. This post might help you in those processes. I might be saving you over $1500 with this article alone, so it’s worth becoming a paid subscriber just for this! But this info is so important that I don’t want to put a paywall on it.

Last year, I took two ayahuasca facilitator trainings (since sometimes I do facilitate ceremonies and hopefully will do more in future now that my partner is a baby shaman).

The first was a course from ICEERS.org. I love ICEERS and I believe they have good minds and hearts, so that’s why I forked out the cash for this course.

The second was Atira Tan’s course on trauma-informed plant ceremony facilitation (which was actually not specifically about ayahuasca).

Below, I will address what I learned in these courses and then I will address what neither course taught but which should be taught. This post will be far from comprehensive, obviously, since the courses spanned weeks, but I will try to give important points.

Various individuals have told me I should teach a course myself, but one reason that I don’t is because… nobody would ever want to take it! Actually, already, nobody wants to take the courses available, because by the end of any of these courses, you will come to the conclusion that nobody is doing this right and it’s almost impossible to do it right. So why did you pay all that money for a course if all it can do is dash your dreams? Answer: so that you can tell people you “took the course,” thus validating your approach, even if your approach is contrary to the course!

ICEERS Course Highlights

The ICEERS course draws from experts in psychology and traditional knowledge to promote respectful, structured sessions that maximize benefits while minimizing risks. Here are some of the things I learned in their 2024 course (it didn’t change much in 10 years btw):

• Ethical Boundaries

  • Maintain confidentiality during the ceremony and afterward. It is not your choice to disclose anything personal that anyone has shared with you, but rather they should choose.

  • Be honest about your limits. It’s common for the facilitator to be seen as an oracle, someone with all the answers, but this is extremely dangerous, because in reality, even the best shaman does not have all the answers. If you ever ask your guide a bunch of questions they couldn’t possibly know the answers to, and they don’t say, “I don’t know,” then you should immediately discard them and seek another guide. (Ditto for medical doctors, btw.) It’s unfortunately extremely common for shamans and guides to claim that they know your problems are due to XYZ, or that something you experienced was a real hidden memory you uncovered.

  • Maintain professional distance, which is expanded on below:

• Single Guys & Gals, Go Home!

  Maybe one of the most controversial points! There was a discussion on the practice within the Santo Daime tradition (largest ayahuasca church in the world, now in many countries but originally from Brazil) to exclude bachelors & bachelorettes as well as unhappily married folks from the role of ceremony facilitators. The idea here is twofold:

  • Protect participants from sexual abuse or even sexual fantasies (stemming from transference & countertransference in psych lingo).

  • Provide role models for a balanced spiritual life. Without a harmonious couple as the role model for spiritual development, many people will fall into the trap of feeling like nobody could understand what they’ve gone thru, or they might seek out relationships that are not harmonious as part of a savior complex.

• Ethical fees

  Always collect fees prior to the ceremony. People are too psychologically vulnerable during and after the ceremony (even for some months after). Do not accept over-generous donations until 6 months post-ceremony. You might consider a sliding scale for fees to make it affordable for people of different income levels. Avoid the temptation to let anyone come totally for free. People don’t value what they get for free, or they don’t see it as professional. Even in tribal contexts, ceremonies are not free for participants. The shaman will request that the participant gather some plants for them, or paint a picture, or somehow make an effort towards reciprocity.

• Keep your own safety in mind.

  Operating in a legal environment for ayahuasca is paramount to avoid going to jail. There actually are no countries where ayahuasca is fully legal in any context, although some countries have legalized its use in “traditional” ceremonies or by certain religious groups. Even if you are operating legally or nearly legally, you can still face danger from participants who have adverse outcomes, or even from their family or partners who feel that they might have been brainwashed or manipulated by you (for example, when a participant realizes in ceremony her partner is abusive).

• Harm reduction contract & referrals

  Ensure everyone does one-on-one interviews with you and signs a contract in which they explain their life conditions, beliefs, physical and mental health conditions, and any meds they take. You should consult qualified professionals to exclude high-risk participants, and refer them to qualified therapists, and you should warn moderate-risk participants about their risk factors for adverse outcomes. Also provide full disclosure about potential long-term adverse mental health effects and refer to a competent integration therapist (since you probably don’t have time or expertise to try to help each failed participant for potentially years). Participants must also agree to be supervised until sober. Each person should be given a dose individually selected in consultation with them. Intentions should be set in a clear, realistic, and appropriate way that can be supported within the harm reduction protocol.

• Emergency Protocols

  Have detailed emergency plans, including first aid knowledge and protocols for scenarios like psychotic episodes or physical distress. They highlight breathing exercises and active listening

  for emotional difficulties, with medication as a last resort.

• Integration Support

  ICEERS emphasizes post-session support, such as sharing circles, creative processing tools, and follow-up check-ins to help participants regain stability and derive meaning from challenging experiences. It includes monitoring via questionnaires to track long-term well-being.

• Facilitator Self-Diagnosis

  Learn self-evaluation techniques to assess and refine your practices, including questionnaires for feedback and reflection on session outcomes. Encourage ongoing self-care, recognize personal biases, and avoid ego inflation from participants' experiences. This involves monitoring one's role, delegating when needed, and using community insights to improve safety and ethics. The emphasis is on continuous improvement to ensure responsible facilitation.

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Atira Tan Course Highlights

Atira’s course is an 85-hour program spanning three months. I found it to be even more redundant than the ICEERS course. There was a lot of vague conceptual talk which ultimately boiled down to relatively few actionable steps, but I still got value from her perspective since I had not had a trauma-focused course before.

Atira sets the stage for the necessity of this course by talking about her own extremely dramatic, scary, and profound experience as a participant in her first ayahuasca ceremony. Her friends took her to this revered Amazonian shaman, and while everyone was high on ayahuasca, this shaman started trying to rape her! Luckily, she was feeling strong enough to fight him off. Afterward, she told her friends what happened, and they all laughed and said, “Oh, yeah, he’s like that!” This caused her to feel disillusioned not only with so-called shamans and spiritual types, but also with those friends she trusted the most. Many people at this point would have just demonized the entire ayahuasca community, but Atira decided to expose the bad apples to make it a better space.

In her course, facilitators learn to identify nervous system patterns in participants, emphasizing that "the body is key" to supporting healing intelligence in altered states. Essential skills include self-regulation and co-regulation techniques, trauma-informed communication, somatic touch protocols with proper consent, and maintaining healthy boundaries. The curriculum covers assessing participant trauma history, building relationships with trauma sensitivity, and working with participants to expand their body-awareness "Window of Presence" before ceremonies.

Common Ground with ICEERS

Both courses share several fundamental principles and practices: safety screenings, ethical boundaries, integration support, emergency protocols, and facilitator self-care.

Key Differences and Contradictions

Theoretical Framework
ICEERS focuses on evidence-based safety using scientific research and medical protocols for general harm reduction, while Atira Tan emphasizes trauma-informed care, focusing on somatic psychology and nervous system regulation through Polyvagal Theory. Atira doesn’t mention that theory is scientifically discredited, but it still provides practical suggestions for calming the nervous system, including humming, singing, dancing, deep breathing, meditation, pet therapy, and attuning to others who are relaxed. She actually didn’t need to mention the theory at all, except that it made her sound more authoritative when giving practical suggestions.

Cultural Paradigms
ICEERS prioritizes preserving traditional ceremonial approaches with careful adaptation, while Atira Tan creates deliberate synthesis between shamanic and psychological paradigms (soul retrieval morphs into addressing dissociation/depersonalization, polyvagal theory addresses soul fragmentation). ICEERS might view Atira Tan's approach as potentially appropriative since it creates new hybrid models rather than adapting existing traditional ones, while Atira Tan might view ICEERS' approach as insufficient for addressing Western trauma patterns that shamanic practices alone cannot heal.

Touch and Physical Intervention
Atira teaches somatic touch protocols as therapeutic resources with proper consent, while ICEERS generally emphasizes maintaining professional boundaries without physical contact. Personally, I have used somatic touch while high myself to help people who were in crisis, and it worked incredibly well, but care must be taken to ensure you are not alone with the person, you know them well, and you ask permission for each place you touch, focusing especially on less sensual zones. It’s especially useful to put this consent on a written contract beforehand to avoid surprises.

Maximizing Participant Agency & Power
Traumatized people may feel re-traumatized when their agency is taken away from them. Thus, Atira’s course focuses on ensuring maximum freedom for the participants. On the other hand, the ICEERS course emphasized that participants should not be allowed to leave the ceremony room without supervision… even just going to the bathroom could end up in a psychotic escape that leads to death (it’s happened!). Atira’s tips include:

• Use invitational language: “I invite you to close your eyes now,” rather than, “Now, close your eyes…”

• Try to understand how easily a traumatized person may be triggered, and avoid triggering them:

  • Be careful looking the participant directly in the eye (but also don’t completely avoid it since that looks sus).

  • Avoid approaching them from a standing position if they are sitting. (On the other hand, slithering towards them might be even more scary!)

  • Avoid looking at them with any feelings that might be triggering, including lust, disgust, etc, which you might not even be aware of if you are not fully present and healed and genuine.

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Essential Info Neither Course Taught

• As a facilitator, before even thinking about how to do ceremonies correctly, you should consider why you are giving ceremonies. We should be doing this to help others to see they can heal themselves, not to feel important and needed by others. If people keep coming to you all the time, that's not a good sign.

  Many folks who get into healing roles are enacting the Wounded Healer archetype. If you are a wounded healer, make sure you explain that to people up front, including the parts of you that aren't fully healed yet. This way, participants can make informed decisions about your guidance.

• There is one device that can dramatically enhance the probability of positive outcomes for participants, which I detailed here.

• The best kind, and most traditional ayahuasca ceremony, would be just you either by yourself (if you feel capable), or with a highly trusted and respected friend or two to help guide you. Here is why:

  • Group ceremonies are inherently flawed.

    There is absolutely nothing traditional about doing ayahuasca with a group of strangers. Shamans come from tribal backgrounds, and they actually normally do ceremonies for troubled individuals in the tribe, but when the group does come together, everyone fully knows each other, and most importantly, everyone fully knows & trusts their own tribal shaman! The AA-style sponsorship model (as Jeronimo from ICEERS explains) is a compromise.

    But beyond that, when a group of people take a psychedelic, especially ayahuasca, they often share visions, emotions, and trip intensity with each other. Are you really healing your own trauma if you aren’t even sure if what you are experiencing is yours or someone else’s? It’s fine to work on healing the collective unconscious also, but most people don’t realize that they are even engaging in that.

  • Shamans can’t heal “white people.”

    Watch the video I made about it. What I am trying to say is, whatever tools a shaman has learned were specifically for healing people in their own tribe, people who actually have a wonderful trust & support network already. These tools don’t necessarily work for modern folks, like for example the 25% of U.S. Americans who have absolutely nobody they trust enough to be completely honest with. While shamans believe that most mental illness is caused by dark magic, evil spirits, evil eye, etc. Dr. Josef, the Taper Clinic psychiatrist, took 5 years to realize that most modern mental illness is caused by dissatisfaction with relationships, jobs, poor diet, or drug use. And let's not forget traumatic childhoods. Most of those causes do not exist in tribal society.
    On the other hand, a good shaman should be able to navigate thru the various dimensions that you might get stuck in, to help you back. But it’s quite tricky to evaluate whether they can do that or not, and even if they can, it’s not good to rely on someone else to save you. Instead, you should slowly and gently build up the capacity to navigate for yourself the various realms and handle your own bad trips.

  • Ceremony facilitators overcharge and overpromise

    Ceremonies are invariably advertised in ways that set expectations unrealistically high. As ICEERS explained, according to the 2022 Global Ayahuasca Survey, with over 10,000 respondents, 56% of people who took ayahuasca experienced adverse mental health effects, and 12% of ayahuasca users sought professional mental help as a result of their session (it helped if they took it in a religious context, but not as much if they took it in a traditional ceremony). Most of those who experienced adverse mental health effects believed it was some kind of sign they were healing… but wouldn’t you want to believe that if you spent $2k on the ceremony? I have never once seen any ceremony advertising that it might cause more harm than good to participants. Even Atira Tan’s ceremony ads are completely biased toward positive benefits you “might” experience without mentioning negatives you might experience. I did contact Atira about this, and she never responded!

• What actually is proper mindset?

  Both courses will make some mention of having a good mindset. This is framed as being present, open, positive, with clear intentions. But both courses are missing:

  • Spiritual path and inner child healing
    To me, this is absolutely key, but I can see why it’s avoided by these courses, because they want to have mass appeal and not get stuck in the mud dealing with people’s wildly varying belief systems. But here’s the thing, if your belief system is not compatible with what ayahuasca etc. will show you (including various forms of ego death), that can create significant cognitive dissonance and yes, adverse mental effects. Some religious traditions actually warn against using psychedelics and some even warn against meditation. Is your path compatible with this ceremony? Is your path compatible with healing the inner child? Here are the mindset principles that have worked well for me.

  • Setting intention to connect with the divine and release blockages
    Prayer can be useful for this. Not the type of prayer where you ask for something that you think you want, but the type where you ask for guidance to see clearly what you are doing to block your spiritual freedom. Be fully ready for guidance, and ask for it out loud. When you are ready and it comes to you, the first phase of this new learning process will be facing your convictions, doubt, desires, arrogance, pride, anger, self-pity. After facing them, always keep every liberating wish in the context of the benefit of all beings. Note that doubt and convictions and even some other blockages can sometimes be useful/adaptive in life, but at a certain point, they can be like the ship anchor which prevents flow.

  • Daily practice
    If it’s one ceremony you do every now and then to try to heal yourself, that’s like eating at McDonald’s every day and then for summer you go on a fad diet. It’s also nice to have special times for purification, but we should do some level of purification on a constant basis.

• What actually is proper setting?

  Aside from just a clean, uncluttered space, or nature setting, wherever you feel most comfortable, the setting and mindset are sometimes indistinguishable. For example, some people find that thru drumming or different forms of sound healing, dance, prayer, they can get into a receptive and humble flow state in which they are ready for a healing experience rather than just a “wait and see what the drug does” kind of state.

• What actually is proper dosing?

  People often overdose during ceremonies precisely because they don't have a regular spiritual practice and they see this time as a rare opportunity to heal. This can obviously have negative repercussions.

  Part of overdosing is the need to purge.

  There's a bit of a controversy around the need for

  purging (vomiting) during a session with psychedelics. Traditionally it is seen not just as a physical purge, but also as an emotional one. WI've purged hundreds of times, yet I never felt any emotional benefit from doing so, which is why I no longer do. Obviously, not everyone benefits from purging, and this should be recognized. While the benefits are unclear, there are some very clear drawbacks:

  • After purging, an unknown part of your dose remains in your stomach.

  • The cause of purging is mainly the parasite die-off toxins, which should be neutralized by consuming ZHoly2O.

• Your experience hinges on more than just (mind)set, setting, and dose.
  This refrain is repeated so widely in psychedelic communities, but there is some more complexity here — all of which I explain in my Soma guide.

  • Understand the effect of parasite die-off toxins on your mental state and how to prevent those deleterious effects, rather than treating them as just a necessary rite of passage or spiritual battle.

  • Understand the effects of opening your chakras to energies that may not be visible in the “setting,” and how to manage or prevent that.

  • Understand that the medicine you are using may vary significantly from strain to strain or batch to batch, and how it affects people will also vary. For example, I personally hate the “Golden Teacher” mushrooms that I’ve tried, but they are almost universally deemed the best ones for beginners to use. To me they felt anxiogenic, with heavy body load, and delusional. I much prefer balanced, spiritual, chill, and fun shroom strains like Mazatapec, Golden Halo, Natalensis, Hillbilly, etc.
    Ayahuasca guides should know about the differences between loveyhuasca & ayahauasca, for example. Iboga guides should know the difference between male and female iboga, and how each tree possesses a unique spirit.

  • Understand the importance of stepwise dosing (doable with aya/loveyhausca and iboga, not so much with other drugs like shrooms).

  • Understand how to deal with bad trips in general.

Always Remember

We may use various tools to connect with our own heart, but we have this capacity and can access it at any time, any place, and without any tools as well, especially once we have seen the door ❤️🙏🏿