Choosing a Psychedelic Facilitator of a Certain Age

State-legal programs make it even easier to review your options

This Thursday, February 5th, 7:30 PM PST I’ll be a panelist at the Psychedelic Salon at the Seattle Town Hall. Info and tickets here!

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Artwork by Lauren Meyer/Painter Dancer

A therapist friend once told me about an older woman who was vetting a psychedelic facilitator. She wasn’t feeling a good connection but hesitated to turn the facilitator down because she was afraid of hurting their feelings. But as my friend pointed out, better to end the relationship early on than have that voice of doubt pipe up just before taking the medicine…

When older adults choose a facilitator to prepare and support them before, during and after a psychedelic journey, they need to focus on what matters. That will often involve assessing their professional qualifications, including checking credentials and asking for references. But ultimately, they will want to ask themselves, will this person be able to see, understand and support me, even during intensely vulnerable moments?

Given a choice, many older adults will feel most comfortable with someone close to their own age.

Elder and more…

Of course, elders have been working as healers since time immemorial. But the point I’d like to make is that having reached older age isn’t the end-all qualification for doing this kind of work.

Coming to psychedelics in older age, we tend to be more intentional than in our youthful spontaneity. At this point, investing time in researching and vetting facilitators and settings is time well spent.

Even as we gravitate to older facilitators, it’s important to remember that each one brings to their work unique expertise, passion and wisdom accumulated over a lifetime. This makes the job of selecting a facilitator so much more interesting - especially in the state-legal psilocybin programs in Oregon and Colorado, where there are many options to choose from!

One of the many benefits of these programs is the ease of reviewing and vetting facilitators. On the Healing Advocacy Fund website, there are links to directories for service centers and facilitators in Oregon and Colorado, among other helpful resources.

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I recently spoke with two older facilitators who are licensed and working in the Oregon psilocybin program. Each one came to this work later in life, and frequently works with older adult clients. Here I share highlights from these conversations, about what brought them to this work as elders and how their life experience informs the way they support their peers.

Extending the Grace of Integration

Cindy Brodner had worked as a therapist for 30 years when she read Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind.

That awakened something in me, this stirring in my soul for a deeper experience or essence – something I knew from my youth was possible through psychedelics.

After working for so long with clients suffering from treatment-resistant depression, she was well aware of how painstakingly slow the therapy process can be. Psilocybin seemed to offer something different. As Oregon advanced its psilocybin program, Cindy found a facilitator training course and graduated in its first cohort. She’s been working as a state-licensed psilocybin facilitator since 2023.

I think that elders gravitate toward me because of my age. Also, because of my background and my experience as a therapist, I attract people who have had mental health issues…

What I often hear from older clients is that it’s now or never. They tell me, ‘I’ve been dealing with this issue my entire life. And now that I’m nearing the end, I don’t want to be living the same way.’

I explain to them there’s no guarantee. It’s different for every person. We don’t know what’s going to happen and how this experience is going to affect things. People can experience some destabilization after these sessions. That’s the whole point, after all. People want change…

For that reason, Cindy offers her clients three integration sessions, with the option for more. To be clear, most facilitators offer one or two integration sessions. This extended support, she explains, can be invaluable for older clients who may find more barriers to the changes needed for healing.

You can learn more about Cindy and her professional offerings here.

Meditation and Psilocybin

As a young woman living on the West Coast in the 70s, Phyllis Moses had plenty of experience with psychedelics. Eventually, through the work of Ram Dass and other teachers, she understood that expanded states of consciousness could be achieved without substances, through deep contemplative practices.

For decades, Phyllis lived in a spiritual community in Maui. She dove deep into yoga and meditation, and found her home in Tibetan Buddhism. Eventually, with a degree in psychology, she hoped to serve as a bridge between the east and west.

Back on the mainland, Phyllis learned from a friend about a facilitator training course gearing up for Oregon’s new psilocybin services program. When she was in her mid-60s, she graduated in their first cohort.

This was where I was owning the gifts that I received from all those psychedelic years and all the spiritual practices. Now I could put them all together…

Phyllis loves her work with elders. And she finds that, when they’ve had a pretty stable life and psyche, they can have amazing openings doing this work.

I would say that 97% of the people I work with go to the next level. Some come back for more journeys because they feel like they need to clear more. And that could be once a month, once every quarter or once a year…

But I don’t want to paint just the rosy picture. If a person is on too many medications or there’s too much masking of trauma, they may not be able to go deeply enough in just one journey. But it can still serve as an opening of the doors of perception.

When I’ve worked with elders, people nearing death, I find it helps them find the essence of what is indestructible. And that’s what the Buddhist path is ultimately about - identifying with the unchanging awareness beneath all experience.

Phyllis will be the lead facilitator in a series of 6-day silent meditation and psilocybin retreats. More information about that here.

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One of the Oregon service centers created this short video about three older women having their first psilocybin experience.

And here’s a link to an interview I did with the Conscious Consultant on NY Talk Radio…