EMBARK’s Clinical Domains

Psychedelics are well known to catalyze profound mystical, spiritual, and religious experiences. In recent decades, a large body of research on psychedelic medicine psychological support shows that participants often report profound encounters of an existential or spiritual nature, and that these experiences hold therapeutic benefit, with some participants even claiming that they are among the most meaningful experiences of their lives.

Participants may experience diverse phenomena in this domain, such as a sense of transcending time and space, a sense of deep insight into the nature of reality, encountering ancestors or spirit guides, feelings of oneness with the universe, and an awareness of the interconnection between humans and all life. More challenging experiences are also common, including feelings of terror at losing one’s sense of self or confrontations with one’s mortality. Therapists can learn to support the full range of existential and spiritual phenomena as opportunities for healing or growth.

A facilitator administering a psychedelic medicine should foster a therapeutic frame that supports participants in preparing for the possibility of these profound and sometimes challenging experiences, as well as integrating and making meaning of them afterward. EMBARK trains facilitators to help participants frame their psychedelic-occasioned spiritual experiences as a basis for healing and meaningful change.

In EMBARK, mindfulness refers to the practice of focusing awareness on one’s inner experience and bringing attention to what is happening in each present moment. It centers on the cultivation of a kind of “observer consciousness” that bears witness to thoughts, sensations, and experience from a place of self-compassion. Individuals participating in psychedelic-assisted therapy often find that their treatment leaves them more able to adopt a mindful stance toward themselves, which inspires benefits such as greater psychological flexibility, greater acceptance of challenging emotions and thoughts, and connecting with a “deeper” or “truer” self that is less rigidly identified with self-defeating beliefs.

EMBARK employs mindfulness techniques from evidence-based treatments to support participants, not only with navigating the psychedelic experience, but also with sustaining post-treatment benefits through improved attentiveness to their inner states and in tolerating distress. EMBARK facilitators are trained to support participants in cultivating mindfulness throughout the course of treatment to help them foster a nonjudgmental, compassionate approach toward themselves and their experiences, develop a renewed relationship with their own challenging thoughts and feelings, and cultivate an inner resilience essential for growth.

During psychedelic facilitation, the body can act as a doorway into deep healing. Participants undergoing psilocybin-assisted therapy have described experiencing a range of embodied phenomena, such as meaningful changes in their perception of their bodies, cathartic discharges of trauma that has been held in their bodies, and enduring changes to their sense of themselves as embodied beings.

EMBARK embraces the body as a site of wisdom and healing. EMBARK draws from pioneering somatic (body-centered) therapies in the recognition that the mind and body are not separate, particularly in the context of non-ordinary states of consciousness. The EMBARK approach employs somatic techniques throughout treatment to guide participants toward trusting their bodies’ intelligence and natural ability to heal. As somatic experiences may indicate a response to past trauma, facilitators receive training to work with emergent somatic material within a trauma-informed frame.

During psychedelic facilitation, participants often have deep emotional experiences beyond what they are able to access in their daily lives or in regular therapy. Many describe transcendent feelings of joy, bliss, and love, as well as moments of struggle with feelings of despair, fear, sadness, and grief, often as part of a healing catharsis. At other times, participants find themselves confronting challenging beliefs about themselves with a directness that they would normally avoid. With appropriate integration support, these openings can lead to lasting psychological change.

The EMBARK model supports participants with identifying, welcoming, and experiencing affective (emotional) states more fully. EMBARK training prepares facilitators to support participants during moments of extreme emotionality and facing core psychological wounds. EMBARK-trained facilitators employ interventions that help participants confront, accept, and shift seemingly intolerable thoughts and feelings, while helping them understand how their avoidance of these aversive feeling states often drives problematic behaviors in everyday life.

EMBARK’s approach centers on the idea that people are not lone, atomized individuals, but rather deeply connected and embedded in relationships. During psychedelic facilitation, people often have experiences of seeing their mother or father, siblings, grown children, past romantic partners, and other meaningful life connections.  They may also experience their relationship with their facilitator in a new way that brings unique opportunities for relational healing.

Psychedelic medicine holds a unique capacity to bring the ways that a participant has been shaped by relationship to the forefront. Their relational history, including attachment ruptures and relational trauma, often from childhood, can emerge in their experience or be brought to life in their relationship with the facilitator. When responded to skillfully, these emergent dynamics within the therapeutic relationship can offer corrective emotional experiences and opportunities for relational repatterning.

EMBARK goes further than other approaches to psychedelic-assisted therapy in emphasizing the relational domain. Facilitators are trained to attend to relational cues as they arise during psychedelic sessions, guiding participants to bring awareness to how their past has shaped their present way of relating. Participants can then explore different ways of relating, setting healthy boundaries, experiencing greater safety in relationship, and expressing themselves more authentically. With psychological support, participants can internalize and integrate these new experiences and carry them into their lives as new beliefs about themselves and new ways of relating to others.

During psychedelic facilitation, participants are presented with a critical window for making changes to their lives according to their own goals. After a medicine session, participants often emerge with a new perspective on life and a strong readiness and motivation to make changes that support them. With appropriate integration and therapeutic support, this moment of enhanced motivation offers an opportunity for making and sustaining these desired shifts, bringing the insights and healing of psychedelic-assisted treatment into everyday life.

“Keeping momentum” refers to this process of translating altered states into altered traits through a sustainable, participant-led commitment to ongoing change. This domain holds a place in EMBARK for recognizing the need for such post-treatment changes and helping the participant to set their sights on their importance from the beginning of treatment. Facilitators trained in EMBARK are prepared for the task of supporting participants in taking concrete steps towards meaningful change in their lives.