Failure to Launch: How to Embrace an Underwhelming Mushroom Journey

You’ve been planning your mushroom journey for months. In the last few weeks, you’ve gotten ALL the goosebumps, from sudden flushes of excitement to anxious shudders of anticipation. Though your facilitator has warned you against grandiose expectations, you can’t help but regard the upcoming treatment as a pivotal event in your life. After all, you’ve signed up for this therapy because you want to feel better and finally embody your whole self. Consequently, you don’t skimp on the preparation. You’ve spent the last week journaling about your intentions, carving out time in your hectic schedule to sit alone with your thoughts, and you’ve even started to build an altar of sorts that honors the humans and feelings that mean a lot to you. Likewise, you’ve practiced dropping into the experience and you’re prepared to navigate the onset of a mushroom journey. 

You arrive at the center—confident and a little nervous—but fully trusting the container you’ve built with your facilitator. You ground yourself in the space, accept a cup of a large dose of mushrooms and drink it down in three intentional gulps. You talk nervously with your facilitator and about 25 minutes later (generally when the mushrooms begin to come on) you don your eyemask, tuck yourself in and ready yourself for the mushrooms’s imminent arrival. You wait. And wait some more. You think you might see wisps of geometric shapes in your mind's eye, but you realize that you’re squinting and that image is not necessarily a byproduct of psilocybin.

30 more minutes go by. You still aren’t feeling much. You take your eyemask off, look up to your facilitator, shrug your shoulders and mutter a WTF. At this point, you’re starting to get frustrated. You spent months preparing for this experience. You’ve felt better than you have in years because you’ve been working toward this date on the calendar. What would you tell all your friends and support network who were so invested in your journey? So what now? Is there a way to salvage this tie-dyed trainwreck?

How to Save a Mushroom Trip in Real Time

So, yeah it happens. While failing to launch on a hero dose of psychedelics is very rare, occasionally the universe plays a wild card. While it is a fringe scenario, it’s worth investigating because the feelings that accompany this experience tend to mirror the emotions that emerge within a slightly more common context—when, during the journey, a client feels the mushrooms aren’t as powerful as they wanted them to be. 

So how do I manage this scenario in real time? First, I preach patience—sometimes a mushroom trip builds gradually and what we thought was a mild journey turns into a psychedelic epic. Additionally, I often keep a booster dose in reserve so we can sort of up the ante on the experience; oftentimes, that extra serving of mushrooms is all a client needs to float up up and away. That said, sometimes fate has other plans. I had one month where a client took the same strain and same dose as I had taken myself 2 weeks earlier. I experienced an ego death and had the most powerful trip of my life. My client, on the other hand, had a few visuals, but never actually departed from an ordinary state of consciousness.

Preparation Helps Us Maximize Any Kind of Mushroom Journey

Let’s return to the opening scenario and channel that person’s potential frustration. How can they actually salvage the journey? The answer primarily lies in preparation. One of the principles that I emphasize well before we schedule the journey is the fact that we cannot predict or control the psilocybin experience. Regardless of the dose, we don’t get to decide the magnitude of our trip.

That said, we can control how we approach the journey. When we adopt an attitude of trust and surrender, a mild experience seems much less like a downer than a gentle opportunity to learn. In fact, sometimes we don’t need to be ripped open or catapult through the cosmos; yeah, what if all we really needed was a quiet room, a slight amplifier and our intentions to keep us company? 

Furthermore, we frequently do the really uncomfortable work in preparation anyway. As we audit our past relationships and relive episodes of trauma, we are unflinchingly gazing at our forever pain. As we nurture a support network, we are creating community which is generally an essential step toward lasting wellness. And finally, as we prepare ourselves for a transformative experience, we perform acts of self-advocacy that we haven’t had the courage to do in the past.

All Hope is Not Lost

I often joke with my clients that their journey date is their psychedelic spa day. We have the room to ourselves, a good soundtrack, cool art to look at, a cavalry of incense and sketch pads galore. If my client winds up as one of the 1% of people who don’t launch, we’ve got plenty to do and progress to make. 

Honestly, if folks have rigorously prepared, they come to the journey equipped with a notebook full of intentions. Even if they’re not being bathed in psychedelic insight, they still have an arsenal of ideas they can explore through meditation, deep breathing, artwork or just talking to their facilitator. 

In addition, it’s amazing what headphones and sacred intentions can create even in the most sober of mindscapes. Your psychedelic spa day—regardless of the power of the mushrooms—still has the potential to accelerate your journey to wellness. 

Integration is Essential After a Mild Psilocybin Experience

Wait a minute? You didn’t ride a centaur through a black hole made of butterscotch, only to emerge inside a nintendo game alongside your mother only to breakdance fight with all the bad guys you’ve ever met? You didn’t skateboard the astral plane while your body slowly dissolved into a circus tent called eternity? You didn’t…okay I’ll stop. But the point is that you actually didn’t really hallucinate at all, so why would you need help connecting the dots of your experience? 

Integration is so much more than sifting through the rubble of a shifting psychedelic landscape. It’s returning to your intentions under the guise of a fresh perspective. It’s identifying convictions that seem to resonate with a deeper frequency than they did a few months ago and taking steps to honor them in your day-to-day life. It’s brainstorming,  alongside your facilitator, tangible ways to measure your progress toward a more holistic and fulfilling existence. 

Yeah, failing to launch sucks. But it’s not the end of the world—it’s actually an opportunity to trust your intuition, celebrate and exploit the progress you made in preparation and to look back to see that you have, indeed, traveled so far, so fast.