Psychedelic Preparation and Integration
Thoughtful, ethical psychedelic preparation and integration coaching – where insights become lived and embodied.
From Journey to Life: Preparation, Integration, and Unfolding
Psychedelic experiences can catalyze profound shifts in perception, opening doorways that conventional approaches rarely touch. Yet the experience itself is only one moment in a much larger unfolding. What transforms lives is not the intensity of the experience but how deeply its insights become integrated into the fabric of your being.
This work recognizes that preparation and integration are as essential to psychedelic work as the experience itself. Without proper preparation, intense experiences can remain disorienting rather than illuminating. Without skilled integration, even the most profound insights tend to fade, leaving only memories of transcendence rather than embodied transformation.
Whether you're approaching your first ceremony with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation, or you're an experienced practitioner sensing that something from past journeys remains unintegrated, this offering provides the relational container and skilled guidance that allows expanded states to serve your deepest development.
Psychedelic preparation and integration are part of my broader approach to consciousness coaching.
What’s Psychedelic Preparation?
Preparation is about cultivating the inner and outer conditions that allow a psychedelic experience to serve your genuine development. We orient toward readiness, tending to the whole ecology of factors that shape experience: mindset, environment, support systems, and your current phase of life.
This process begins with meeting yourself as you are: clarifying what’s calling you to this work, sensing your current capacity to hold intensity, and establishing a stable inner foundation.
Preparation means entering the process in right relationship—with yourself, others, the medicine, and the wider web of life.
Preparation can involve:
Clarifying your orientation – Exploring what’s drawing you to psychedelic work and discerning whether now is the right moment.
Setting intentions from presence – Allowing authentic intentions to emerge from your deeper intelligence rather than goal-seeking or expectation.
Cultivating inner stability – Strengthening your capacity for grounding, emotional regulation, and somatic awareness before entering expanded states.
Working with fears and resistances – Meeting ambivalence and vulnerability with curiosity rather than suppression.
Establishing supportive set and setting – Attending to the physical, psychological, and relational environment that shapes the experience.
Ethical discernment – Ensuring that facilitators, medicines, and contexts align with safety, legality, and integrity.
Developing embodied anchors – Establishing breath and movement practices that help you return to center during challenging moments.
Learning to navigate the journey – Journeying is a skill that you can learn and practice without psychedelics.
Engaging supportive practices – Deepening your relationship with consciousness through dreamwork, imaginal journeying, breathwork, or meditation, modalities that prepare the psyche to move fluidly across states.
Clarifying support and aftercare – Planning for integration support, community, and rest following the experience.
Philosophical preparation – Cultivating frameworks that orient you toward integration rather than confusion.
Preparation, in this view, is already part of the journey. It shapes the depth, safety, and meaning of what unfolds.
What’s Psychedelic Integration?
Integration is the natural unfolding of what has already begun. Psychedelic experiences open the psyche and the body in ways that reveal new patterns, emotions, and insights. True integration happens as these openings are met with awareness, compassion, and embodied participation over time.
The process unfolds in phases: immediate grounding, unfolding integration, and the gradual embodiment. Each phase serves a different horizon of becoming: first tending to the body and nervous system, then working with what is arising and deepening, and finally allowing insight to reorganize how you live and relate.
This process is not about interpretation or explanation.
Integration is the art of staying in relationship with the journey until it reveals its wisdom on its own terms.
Integration can involve:
Letting the experience breathe – Allowing time for the nervous system and psyche to settle before drawing conclusions or taking major decisions.
Re-entering life consciously – Noticing how perception, relationships, or values subtly shift in the days that follow.
Unfolding what remains alive – Returning to the experience through imaginal journeying, journaling, and dialogue
Working with parts – Meeting any protective, disappointed, or fearful aspects of the psyche that were activated, and allowing their integration into the whole.
Following living threads – Tracking insights, emotions, or bodily sensations that continue to evolve
Engaging supportive practices – Using breathwork, somatic awareness, dreamwork, imaginal journeying, or meditation to embody what was revealed.
Exploring nondual or transpersonal openings – Learning to recognize deeply expanded states not as peak events but as glimpses of a more complex reality than previously imagined.
Redesigning life – Gradually translating insight into new ways of relating, working, and creating that express greater coherence and care.
When supported with presence and relational holding, psychedelic experiences can mature into embodied wisdom, creative purpose, and deeper participation in life itself.
My Approach to Psychedelic Work
What is the source of transformation in psychedelic experiences? Is it the substance, the journey itself, the integration that follows, or perhaps something else?
Psychedelic journeys often feel alive with intelligence and creativity. Whether we make sense of that intelligence as our own deeper nature, the wisdom of the psyche, or the medicine itself, something essential happens: our way of perceiving and participating in reality shifts, opening new dimensions of meaning, connection, and possibility.
Transformation as a Living Process
My approach centers on allowing these experiences to catalyze and deepen your ongoing unfoldment.
Rather than asking, “What did the medicine show me?” this work asks, “What’s arising and deepening right now?” Just as it’s rarely helpful to try to direct or control a psychedelic experience, we engage a process that naturally reconfigures our ways of being and participating in life.
This approach recognizes that the changes that follow are rarely linear. They emerge in their own time, often in forms that seem only loosely connected, or even unrelated, to what was seen or felt.
Coaching provides a space to cultivate that orientation – to deepen presence, discernment, and ethical clarity as you stay in relationship with what continues to unfold. The work extends beyond any specific journey, inviting transformation to keep maturing through the rhythms of living.
Ultimately, psychedelic work is not about chasing extraordinary experiences but about living the transformation that reshapes how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world.
Bridging ways of knowing
My approach draws on insights from coaching, psychology, psychedelic science, consciousness studies, and contemplative traditions. This work honors both evidence-based and experiential ways of knowing.
Who’s this for?
This work is for those who approach psychedelics with sincerity, discernment, and care.
It may be especially relevant if you:
Have a commitment to engaging psychedelic experiences as a way of becoming more whole, responsive, and ethically attuned to life.
Are preparing for a legal ceremony or retreat and wish to engage the whole arc with grounded presence and clear intention.
Sense that something meaningful has opened in you and wants to find expression in daily life.
Possess a strong foundation of inner work and self-regulation, and have already engaged in foundational healing or therapeutic work.
Are interested in exploring expanded states within a broader process of unfoldment, seeing psychedelics as one doorway among many.
Are curious about how perception, identity, and meaning reorganize in the wake of profound experiences, and wish to navigate that process with discernment and care.
Feel a sense of personal responsibility toward the psychedelic field itself, contributing to a sustainable culture of care, humility, integrity, and reciprocity.
If you feel called to approach this territory, this work offers a relational container in which what has been touched can continue to unfold into lived transformation.
Working together
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I’m Marcel, an Aletheia Coaching practitioner and certified psychedelic practitioner through the Psychedelic Coaching Institute (Third Wave). This work arises from nearly 15 years of immersion in contemplative, imaginal, somatic, and relational traditions.
My own path with expanded states has revealed both their unique potential and their real challenges. They’ve opened me to profound beauty and insight, and at times confronted me with experiences that humbled me to the core. What I’ve learned is that the real transformation doesn’t come from peak states themselves, but from carefully weaving their gifts into daily life.
In a cultural moment where ecstatic states are often hyped or oversimplified, I aim to steward these tools with depth, discernment, and ethical grounding. My role is to hold a safe, skillful container where your own intelligence and wholeness can unfold through the doorway of expanded states.
My work continues to evolve through dialogue with the growing fields of psychedelic science and consciousness studies.
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1) Consciousness coaching
A coaching engagement combining depth-oriented coaching and journey workScope: developmental coaching, preparation, and integration
Cadence: bi-weekly (weekly in month one if helpful)
Timeframe: 6 months
Good for: deep transformational work, sustained integration
2) Experience-centred package
A short arc built around a specific experience.Scope: preparation and/or integration
Format: by arrangement
Good for: focused support before and after a defined event
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Consciousness Coaching (4-month+ coaching containers): from AU $500/month
Preparation & Integration: AU $250/session
Each coaching session lasts approximately one hour.
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Online via Zoom (available globally)
In-person in Sydney:
Freshwater Wellness Centre (Northern Beaches)
Public locations around Manly
Other locations might be possible by arrangement
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Safety is the foundation of this work. Each coaching engagement is guided by care, transparency, and respect for your autonomy.
Before beginning, I invite an initial conversation to ensure that this work is a good fit within your current context. Screening for psychological state, medical safety, and legal alignment helps us establish a foundation of trust and readiness.
Sessions are collaborative, trauma-informed, and paced to honour your capacity. When strong emotions or destabilization arise, we slow the process and ground before continuing. If material emerges that falls outside the scope of coaching, I pause the work and help you connect with qualified therapeutic or medical professionals from my referral network.
My practice adheres to the ethical standards of the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and the Psychedelic Coaching Institute (PCI), which emphasize professionalism, confidentiality, informed consent, and client wellbeing.
Legal and ethical context
This work does not encourage or condone any illegal activities in Australia or any other jurisdiction, including the use of prohibited substances. I do not provide or facilitate access to psychedelic substances, nor do I offer guidance or supervision for psychedelic experiences.
I also do not promote or glorify the use of psychedelic substances. My work acknowledges both their potential and their risks, emphasizing informed, ethical, and legally compliant engagement.
My services are educational and developmental in nature, supporting preparation for and integration of experiences that occur in legal, safe, and non-clinical settings – for example, in jurisdictions where regulated psychedelic retreats are permitted or in other lawful international contexts.
This work does not replace psychotherapy, medical treatment, or any form of clinical psychedelic-assisted therapy. If you are seeking or undergoing clinical treatment, I encourage you to work with qualified medical or therapeutic professionals.
All coaching is conducted in accordance with Australian law and focuses on personal development, mindfulness, and wellbeing.
Ready to start your journey?
To start your journey, schedule an exploratory convesation using the form below. There's no cost. Just a space to connect, ask questions, and sense what might be supportive.
