Why I Wrote A Book On Psychedelic Accompaniment

An announcement, and the story behind it

Later this year, I'm releasing my first book, written together with Gyasi Bramos-Hantman.

It's called The Companion: An Embodied Guide to Safe and Ethical Psychedelic Accompaniment.

It's the book I wish had existed when I first started exploring this field.

Where this started

Psychedelics are having a moment. Retreats are multiplying, guides and facilitators are everywhere, and for many people, a psychedelic experience has become almost a rite of passage, something to seek out, book, and show up for.

And in many ways, that's a beautiful thing. These substances, approached with care, can open real doors.

But over the years, both as journeyers ourselves and as body psychotherapists working with clients afterward, Gyasi and I kept noticing the same gap, again and again.

Most offerings are built entirely around the experience itself. 

The ceremony, the medicine, the music, the setting. What almost nobody talks about with the same care is what comes before - how prepared you actually are, and what comes after - what you're supposed to do with everything that surfaces.

If you're lucky, it's a beautiful experience, and that's wonderful. But if it isn't (or even if it is, and it still leaves you with more questions than answers) what then?

I've sat with many clients in exactly that place. People who had a powerful, often profound experience, and then came out the other side not knowing what to do with it. Not knowing how to make meaning of what they saw or felt. Not knowing how to integrate it into an ordinary daily life. Not knowing which insights to trust, which decisions to act on, or how to metabolize what came up (sometimes old wounds, old grief, old fear) without a container to hold it.

That gap is what this book is trying to address.

What the book is actually about

The Companion isn't a guide about which substance to take, or how. It's about one of the most consequential decisions in the entire process, and the one that gets the least attention: who you choose to accompany you (your so-called trip sitter).

We wrote it around three ideas that kept surfacing, again and again, in our own work and our own journeys:

• Healing is relational. It doesn't happen in isolation. It happens in the quality of the relationships around us, including the one with whoever is holding space for us.

• Transformation is embodied. Insight alone rarely changes life. What matters is what actually gets integrated into the body, the nervous system, and the way we live afterward.

• Wisdom is ethical. Training and experience matter, but the deepest measure of a good companion is how they hold another person's vulnerability with humility, boundaries, and care.

As we write in the book itself: the companion is not simply another part of the setting. They become part of the experience itself.

My own thread through this

If there's one thing I keep coming back to in my own work, it's the relationship between the body and altered states of consciousness.

Altered states can be an extraordinary doorway, but they can also become a very sophisticated way of leaving the body altogether. A way of floating somewhere expansive and beautiful while staying just as disconnected from ourselves as before, maybe even more so. I've seen how easily "transcendence" can quietly become another form of dissociation, especially for people who already have a complicated relationship with their bodies.

That's not the doorway I want to point people toward.

What I care about in my practice, and in this book, is something closer to the opposite: using altered states not to escape the body but to come home to it. Not dissociation, but wholeness. Not leaving yourself behind in search of something bigger but discovering that the body was part of the "something bigger" all along.

That thread runs through everything Gyasi and I wrote.

What's next

Over the coming months, I'll be sharing more. Some background and a few reflections from the writing process, and small glimpses into what's inside, before it's out in the world at the end of the year.

If any of this resonates, if you've had a psychedelic experience and felt unsure what to do with it afterward, or if you're someone who's thought carefully about who you'd trust to accompany you through something so vulnerable, I'd love to hear from you.

More soon.