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The path that led me to accompany people in the exploration of consciousness
After so much writing—three books (two translated in English) and an entire blog written, so far, entirely on my own—and especially after countless emails and messages from friends and readers asking questions and seeking guidance, the time has come to move from theory to practice. It is time to act, and no longer only to write.
I took the first step in this direction last summer, when I organized a group of Italians and we traveled to the Netherlands to take part in mushroom ceremonies. It was such a beautiful and special experience that I decided to offer it again this year.
But that is not enough.
I realized that I want to do more, for a greater number of people, and not only during the few days of a retreat. I would like to be useful throughout the year, to anyone who feels the need to find their bearings in this particular territory of human experience.
Over the years, I have come to understand that my work is not simply about providing information on psychedelics. What I actually do is help people orient themselves in inner territories that are rarely explored with an adequate map.
Every profound experience—psychedelic or otherwise—opens a space of consciousness in which it is easy to lose one’s points of reference. And it is precisely in those moments that a good map can make all the difference.
How does one arrive at doing this kind of work? To answer that question, I first need to tell you something about myself and the path that brought me here.
The Magical World of Advertising
I would like to avoid the résumé effect. I have been working for many years, and I will spare you the story of all the classic jobs one does to make a little money: bartender, babysitter, shop assistant, and many other occupations that probably belong to the lives of many people of my generation. My real formal entry into the working world began when, by chance—yes, truly by chance!—I won a competition that allowed me to study and work in an advertising agency. For a few years, I had the opportunity to work and gain experience in some of the most important American multinational advertising agencies.
Yes, the one in the photograph, on an advertising set in the mid-eighties, is really me.
During those years, I learned to work within rigorous and well-codified procedures. This is probably one of the disciplines in which Americans excel the most: the ability to turn almost any activity into something that can be explained, taught, and described in an operating manual.
I am almost certain that my first book still carries the influence of that experience.
The other side of the coin, however, was extreme competitiveness and a dedication to work that often seemed to exist only for its own sake. I still remember one evening when I had completed everything I had to do and left the office at six. My boss looked at me in surprise and asked, “Are you taking a half day?”
It was one of those episodes that remain etched in memory. Together with other similar experiences, it contributed to my decision to leave that golden world after only a few years. For a long time, I described that choice simply by saying, “I quit advertising,” more or less in the same tone someone might use to say they had quit smoking.
Perfumes and Essential Oils
After resigning, I have always worked as an entrepreneur and consultant, starting businesses and developing projects that, in many ways, I still consider innovative today. For many years, when someone asked me, “What do you do for a living?” I would simply answer, “I’m an inventor,” because it was the only definition capable of summarizing a rather varied professional life.
One of the fields in which I most developed my creative and design-oriented side was that of perfumes, both for spaces and for personal use. It is a fascinating world, made of subtle perceptions, memory, emotions, and nonverbal languages. A fragrance can alter an inner state before the mind even understands what is happening, and perhaps this is one of the reasons why I have always felt a particular affinity with essential oils.
When they are of good quality, essential oils are not merely fragrant substances. They are living materials, complex, rich in phytotherapeutic and vital qualities. They possess a subtle intelligence of their own, a silent way of entering into relationship with the body, the mood, the breath, and memory. In this sense, although they belong to a completely different world, they have always reminded me of magic mushrooms: not inert objects, but living presences with which one must learn to relate with respect.
Only much later would this experience find its place on the map.
Lessons from Psychedelics
My first psychedelic experience dates back to July 1981. I remember the date so clearly because one never forgets the first time. Since then, over the decades, I have lost count of how many times I have journeyed, but I remember very well certain lessons I learned through direct experience and thanks to teachers to whom I will always be grateful.
The first lesson concerns the importance of preparing for the psychedelic journey. Preparation is fundamental in shaping the kind of experience you will have, to the point that today I am convinced that preparation—together with the setting of which it is part—is far more important than the dose. This does not mean, of course, that the dose does not matter; it means that the dose alone explains almost nothing. The same substance, taken by the same person, can open completely different experiences depending on the moment, the inner state, the intention, the context, the music, the presence or absence of someone nearby, and the overall quality of the container in which the experience takes place.
The second lesson is the usefulness of integration: the ability to bring back into daily life the value—and sometimes also the hard lessons—of the psychedelic journey. Without integration, many experiences remain suspended: intense but confused, charged with meaning but difficult to transform into concrete life. Integration also serves to rebalance possible traumas experienced or re-emerged during the experience, and in certain cases it is not merely useful, but absolutely necessary.
The third important lesson concerns the management and safeguarding of the energies that manifest during the use of psychedelics. This work is done by preparing a ceremony suited to the different possible contexts: alone or in a group, indoors or outdoors, in a protected room or in the middle of nature. Every situation requires different forms of attention, yet there are certain essential rules that must be known if one wishes to live a journey that is as safe, meaningful, and rich in stimulus as possible.
Over the years, I realized that all these rules had something in common. They were not simply practical advice, nor technical instructions to be applied mechanically. They were reference points, coordinates, small fragments of a map that was slowly taking shape.
A map that does not merely describe substances, but above all the way consciousness moves, reacts, defends itself, opens, and manifests during a transformative experience.
The Spirit of Psychedelics
Across more than forty years of psychedelic experience, several phases have followed one another. First came the more or less casual experimentation, without any particular criterion and over many years. Then came the period of spiritual practice and ayahuasca ceremonies, which were fundamental for understanding the importance of the special set and setting that comes from the South American tradition, but even more so for directly experiencing the importance of the shaman.
The shaman cannot be a mere facilitator, much less a person with little experience. This realization immediately confronted me with an obvious problem: when it comes to mushrooms, there is no easily accessible shamanic tradition, nor a recognized lineage capable of making anyone who proposes to guide a ceremony with los Niños Santos automatically reliable and credible.
Even Maria Sabina conducted ceremonies that were deeply marked by strong Catholic and Christian influences, certainly far removed from the original Mazatec traditions, of which today there is no known trace clear and continuous enough to be simply resumed and applied.
While practicing spiritual teachings, I therefore began to experiment with the ceremonial use of psilocybe mushrooms, both alone and with others, deepening my knowledge of them and gradually defining the rules that allow one to journey in the best and safest possible way. This subject is explored in depth in my books and also in this post on this blog, but here I want to emphasize one point in particular: I have never considered it sufficient to imitate ceremonial forms from other traditions without understanding their origin, function, and deeper meaning.
When a living tradition is not available, it is not enough to invent a ritual and call it a ceremony. One must build a serious, coherent, respectful, and functional container. One must observe, experiment, correct, and understand. One must understand which elements truly help the person orient themselves within the experience and which, instead, may confuse, distract, or even put them at risk.
Here too, once again, this is a matter of cartography, not folklore, not spiritual aesthetics, and certainly not imitation.
It is a matter of identifying reliable points of reference in an inner territory that can be marvelous, but also extremely powerful and destabilizing if crossed without preparation.
Work and Study
To psychedelic experience and spiritual teachings, I add a long professional career in the world of communication, which continued for many years after my time in advertising, along with a passion for NLP and Ericksonian Hypnosis.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Ericksonian Hypnosis are exceptional tools for better understanding oneself, the surrounding reality, and the way we communicate with ourselves and with others. They are tools that teach us to observe inner processes, recognize patterns, and perceive recurring structures where before there seemed to be only confusion, emotions, and automatic reactions.
This long period of training and practice was complemented by many seminars, almost all residential and immersive, which allowed me to discover and understand emotions, the body, relationships, communication, and certain truly surprising techniques for investigating reality.
These experiences too, though apparently distant from the psychedelic world, contributed to the same direction. They taught me that the reality we live is never only what happens outside us, but also and above all the way we organize it inwardly. Every person inhabits their own map of the world, often without knowing they have built it, and much suffering arises precisely from this ignorance: from failing to recognize that it is our inner map that determines the territory we perceive as reality.
This is why, when I speak of psychedelia today, I never think only of substances. I think of states of consciousness, paradigms, emotions, beliefs, fears, expectations, and the deep questions a person carries with them. I think of the way all this combines and becomes experience.
And it is in this interweaving of life, study, work, spiritual practice, and psychedelia that my way of accompanying people slowly began to take form.
Connecting the Dots
I am telling all this so I can refer to Steve Jobs’s famous commencement address at Stanford University in May 2005, in which he told several memorable stories. One in particular has always struck me, and I want to recall it here.
Jobs spoke about the importance of doing what we are passionate about, following our instinct, and devoting ourselves to what truly attracts us, even when, in the moment, we do not know where it will lead. He himself had done exactly that, and only later, looking back, was he able to “connect the dots” and discover that many seemingly random experiences, lived by following his passions, had actually provided the solid foundation for creating something new and original.
Only by turning back and looking at his life could he see the dots connecting with one another. His different activities, apparently unrelated, had eventually combined to make a new, unique, unrepeatable contribution. In particular, I remember his reference to a calligraphy course he had attended simply because he was fascinated by that discipline. An apparently useless course, without which Apple computers would not have possessed the aesthetic and typographic qualities that still make them preferred tools for people working in creative and artistic fields.
I too, at a certain point, looked back and saw how all my dots had gradually connected to create, at different moments in my life, something new.
Looking around and speaking with many people, I realize how fortunate I have been, but I also know very well that the harder I work, the luckier I become. My good fortune was that I did only and exclusively work I enjoyed. I never spent much time doing something I did not feel was mine, and this is why I was able to draw from all those experiences and connect them in a way that was unique, original, and, I hope, useful.
Only many years later did I realize that something similar to what Jobs described was happening in my own case.
Every experience had added a piece.
Communication. Advertising. Essential oils. NLP. Hypnosis. Spiritual practices. Ceremonies. Mushrooms. Meditation. The study of consciousness. For a long time, they seemed like separate interests, different passions, parallel roads I followed because I felt I had to, without knowing exactly where they would lead me.
Then, almost suddenly, I saw the overall design appear. The dots were not merely connected: they had formed a map.
And it is precisely that map that I continue to explore today and that I wish to share with those who feel the same need to know themselves, orient themselves more clearly in their lives, and move with greater awareness through the transformative experiences that life offers.
Another fundamental ingredient has been trust. I know that life loves me and offers me only experiences that, in one way or another, help me become what I am. We struggle so much to become what we truly are, but it is worth it: each of us, in our own way, is wonderful.
Formalizing a Decision Already Made
Today I realize that, in truth, I have been doing this work for many years.
I thought for a long time about which term to use. “Coach” describes well the kind of support I offer: listening, accompaniment, preparation, integration, and orientation. It is an immediate and understandable term, and for this reason I will continue to use it. But if I had to describe with a single image what I truly feel I do, I would choose another one.
I consider myself a cartographer of consciousness.
Over these decades, I have tried to understand how to orient oneself in the inner territories that emerge during psychedelic experiences, meditation, spiritual practices, and, more generally, all those moments in which consciousness profoundly changes the way it perceives itself and reality.
A map does not replace the journey, and it cannot walk in your place. It cannot tell you what you must see, what you must understand, or in which direction your life should go. But it can help you not to get lost. And this, in the end, is the meaning of the work I wish to offer.
This is why I continue to use the expression Psychedelic Coach: because it describes in a simple and direct way the kind of support I can offer to those approaching the world of psychedelics, or to those who have already lived through experiences they wish to understand more deeply. But what I feel I truly want to transmit is something broader: a way of orienting oneself in the exploration of consciousness.
My goal is to help people work safely with psychedelics, where the law allows it, in order to know themselves and live with greater harmony. At the same time, the work I propose is not only about psychedelic substances, because the exploration of consciousness can happen in many different ways and, above all, continues in everyday life.
The areas in which I can offer support are different, but they all share the same objective: not to teach you what to see, not to tell you what to believe, not to interpret your experience in your place, but to help you orient yourself more clearly along your path.
1 — Psychedelic Consulting and Education
Approaching psychedelics requires knowledge of many things. One needs to know the substances, their effects, contraindications, possible interactions, risks, personal conditions to be evaluated, and the fundamental rules that serve to reduce, as much as possible, the risk of harming oneself or causing harm to others.
I have written a great deal on these points, but I fully understand those who want personalized guidance in order to understand whether it is appropriate for them to approach this world, or simply to clarify doubts, fears, and questions that cannot be fully answered by an article or a book.
In this area, I can offer information, orientation, and education, always with one guiding principle: safety comes first.
Not everyone should have psychedelic experiences. Not everyone is in the right moment to have them. Not every inner, relational, or medical situation is compatible with this kind of experience. Sometimes the most useful support consists precisely in understanding that it is better not to proceed, or that the ground needs to be prepared more carefully first. This too is part of the map.
2 — Preparation for the Experience
Today, preparing myself for a psychedelic journey is simple for me, but I know very well how difficult it can be to master all the necessary information for someone who has never used these substances, or for someone who has used them without a real method.
Preparation does not simply mean choosing a date or gathering a few pieces of information. It means clarifying the intention, evaluating the personal moment, observing the emotional state, preparing the setting, choosing the music carefully, understanding the role of the body, fasting, rest, the relationship with any companions, and everything else that may influence the experience.
To help prevent harm, I am ready to provide all necessary safety indications, but also to support the kind of preparation best suited to the objectives one has for the experience, always in respect of the law and without encouraging the use of prohibited substances.
Preparation is one of the most important moments of the entire process, because it is there that you begin to draw the map of the journey before you even depart.
3 — Integration Support
I have also written extensively about integration, and in particular about the so-called bad trip or, as I often prefer to call it, a challenging journey. I can help those who wish to regain balance after a difficult experience, an experience they did not understand, or one that has left emotional, psychological, or existential consequences.
Sometimes a person returns from a psychedelic experience with very strong insights, powerful images, intense emotions, or decisions that seem absolutely clear. But not everything that appears evident during the journey should be immediately transformed into action in everyday life. A conversation can be necessary precisely to avoid reckless decisions made while one is still under the emotional effect of the experience, or in an inner state that has not yet stabilized.
Integration also serves to understand the meaning of the experiences lived, to recognize personal symbols, to distinguish what has value from what is confusion, and to transform the intensity of the journey into concrete, sustainable, and genuinely useful changes.
In some cases, I have directed the person straight to a therapist or to another professional, because it is important to know how to recognize when the support required exceeds one’s own competence. This too, for me, is part of the responsibility of anyone who accompanies others.
I can also organize and facilitate integration circles, which I consider one of the most beautiful and effective ways to process a psychedelic journey. When well guided, sharing with others allows one to listen, recognize oneself, give words to the experience, and place it within a broader context.
4 — Microdosing Support
There are many different opinions about microdosing. Some studies tend to downplay its effects, referring to placebo and the power of suggestion. I do not ignore these data, but I also know from direct experience—my own and that of people I personally know—that microdosing can work, and that there are approaches capable of making it more or less useful depending on the person, the context, and the intention.
Microdosing should not be approached as a shortcut, nor as a trend, nor as a magical solution. Even when the doses are very low, what matters is the relationship between the substance, the person, the moment in life, daily habits, inner work, and the ability to observe what changes.
Those who want to understand microdosing more clearly can therefore find a reference point for orientation, ask questions, clarify doubts, and evaluate whether this approach makes sense in their own case, always in respect of the law and with the utmost attention to personal safety.
If you do not know microdosing and want to learn more, you can read the post I dedicated to this subject.
5 — Trip Sitting
I have also written at length about trip sitting.
I know very well that some people want the presence of someone experienced, someone who can be there in case help is needed. I understand this need, because during a psychedelic journey it can be very important to know that there is a stable, sober, attentive, and nonjudgmental presence nearby.
The trip sitter must not guide the experience, interpret it, impose meanings, or take the place of the person who is living the journey. Their task is much simpler and, for that very reason, extremely delicate: to hold the setting, ensure safety, protect the space, intervene only when necessary, and help the person remember that they are moving through a temporary process.
I do not encourage or support the use of prohibited substances. However, if someone were to decide to use them anyway, I believe it is right for them to receive assistance, harm-reduction information, and appropriate support, rather than being left alone or forced to improvise.
Here too, the map is fundamental, because the person accompanying the journey must know the territory well enough not to be frightened by what may emerge, and not to interfere unnecessarily with the process.
6 — Ceremonies and Retreats with Magic Mushrooms
I am organizing retreats where the law allows it, and I am available to evaluate proposals for already organized retreats. In particular, I am thinking of experiences in places that possess special natural energies, because the context is an integral part of the journey and can support inner work in a profound way.
Many of these places are located in countries or legal contexts that do not prohibit the use of psychedelic substances, and therefore there will soon be the possibility of journeying in special places, where the experience can be lived safely, with adequate preparation, competent accompaniment, and a carefully built setting.
For me, a ceremony is not an exotic event, not a spiritual performance, and not an elegant way of taking a substance. It is a container. It is a structure. It is a map applied to a concrete experience.
A good ceremony allows the person to enter the journey with greater trust, move through difficult moments with more tools, and return with something that can be integrated into daily life.
How Does It Work?
If you want to learn more, you can write to me at the email address you will find in the contact section of this blog.
Whether you are taking your first steps or already have many experiences behind you, my goal remains the same: to help you read your inner map more clearly, so that every journey may become a concrete opportunity for knowledge, transformation, and growth.
All the best,
Mush Love