Why Community is Essential in Psychedelic Practice

Community is a foundational element of responsible psychedelic practice. With a diverse community around us, psychedelic practitioners have a network of support, structures to ensure accountability and ethics, and guidance on navigating a complex role that there’s not a lot of precedent for in our industrialized systems of healthcare.

Yet, so many practitioners out there – both underground and in the regulated space – are lacking these crucial community structures. 

Community shouldn’t be seen as an optional add-on. Rather, it’s a core pillar of working as a psychedelic guide or therapist who’s rooted in ethics, care, and safety.

Let’s explore why community is so important, and how you can find – and even build – it for yourself.

Community is Lacking in Modern Psychedelic Practice

For underground practitioners, the secretive nature of psychedelic journeywork has often led to isolation, despite the inherently relational nature of psychedelic work. This necessity for secrecy over decades has resulted in small, isolated silos of practitioners rather than open, resilient networks. 

However, community is crucial for underground guides, as it’s the only way to ensure accountability, safety standards, and knowledge distribution in the absence of a greater structure.

And now that psychedelic care becomes more medicalized and regulated (note, we don’t love everything about this trend!), models are shifting toward focusing on the practitioner-client dyad, as is typical in clinical work. A highly individualized, clinical focus, even while no longer “underground,” can still neglect the practitioner’s need for external support, consultation, and peer connection.

Community is just as important for above-ground practitioners. Peer support groups, interdisciplinary networking events, and non-clinical gatherings (think: song circles, ecstatic dance, picnics, meditation circles, and so on) can help practitioners move beyond medicalization. Community helps us ensure that the heart, spirit, and humanity of the work are not lost to bureaucratic pressures and clinical isolation.

Community Provides Mechanisms for Accountability

A connected community is a safer community. It provides a network for vetting resources, practitioners, and referrals, all of which are crucial for upholding safety.

When operating within a wider network, practitioners can build in mechanisms for accountability. Accountability is essential in psychedelic work, as risks of ego inflation and exploitation of power dynamics run high once someone steps into the role of “healer” or “guide”  in the eyes of others.

Community can bring potentially unethical or unsafe behaviors to the attention of the individual in a constructive, non-combative way – helping to keep each other in check and uphold ethical standards.

Crucially, a group of peers can help practitioners recognize their own shadow and understand where it might be showing up in their psychedelic work.

A powerful example of this in action showed up during one of our training weekends, when one student was unaware of how their actions were impacting the larger group. This person was playing out familiar familial patterns of being a helper, without awareness of the established boundaries that were being violated.

When faculty spoke to this person, other community members also offered their feedback, with the permission of the student. This evolved into a rich dialogue between students, ultimately supporting the person to feel both empowered and held accountable by their peers. We witness each other when we’re in community, and that witnessing can be an essential part of our growth if we’re open to the reflections.

Psychedelic Practitioners Need Support

Community also provides essential support for psychedelic practitioners. This work is

spiritually and emotionally demanding, often involving spending entire days present with someone as they move through deep-rooted grief and emotional breakthroughs.

Community connection is critical here, acting as a buffer against burnout, compassion fatigue, and the sheer weight of holding space for big work.

Just as your clients benefit from feeling seen and held in integration circles post-journey, practitioners gain tremendously from being able to share their experiences with their peers. Feeling validated by others doing similar work and the therapeutic value of simply putting difficult experiences into words in front of others helps practitioners feel more resourced as they go back out and continue their work.

During one of our training weekends, a student was feeling disconnected from the larger group and struggled to go deep with the medicine during the group journey. While the faculty stepped in to assist her, the deeper support came from her fellow students, especially her roommate.

The two students spent one evening connecting and stargazing on the earth outside, and the following night, they were joined by other members of the group. This became a special moment in the training for everyone involved, especially the participant who had felt out of place. In community, you have the opportunity to find resonance and belonging. We hold each other in community.

Community Helps us Stay Right-Sized

One of the core pillars of being a safe and ethical psychedelic practitioner is commitment to our own personal growth. Regular supervision and consultation – at all levels of skill and experience – forces practitioners to be humble and transparent about times they’ve messed up (which we all do!).

What’s more, community spaces act as a mirror for practitioners and inherently prevent the isolation and grandiosity that can arise in individual practice. Community shows them the importance of receiving critique and neutralizing the potential for an individual to become the sole authority. The facilitator of a psychedelic journey space matters a lot, but let us not center ourselves in this work. 

Good community helps keep us right-sized – we are valuable and important in the gifts we each have to share, but we are not meant to elevate ourselves over anyone else.

Community Can Support Us When We Lack Elders 

In Indigenous medicine traditions, elders might serve to transmit the necessary reverence, humility, knowledge, and spiritual ground that define medicine work and healership. Yet in our current industrialized context, we generally lack these opportunities to learn and be initiated by medicine elders.

The intentional creation of community can help fill this critical void, allowing practitioners to collectively develop a self-regulating, ethical, and spiritually-grounded way of working, so that the community is functioning together as an “Eldership.”

The responsibility of wisdom-keeping and guidance is distributed and decentralized, enabling its members to share and integrate wisdom and practices that help it build spiritual ground and maintain fair systems of power.

For example, a practitioner with deep experience in somatic integration may mentor another who has extensive experience with ceremonial practices, and then vice versa. This decentralized system can ensure knowledge transmission is respectful of diverse expertise and avoids placing undue authority on a single person to “know it all.”

In this way, community also acts as the bridge, inviting and connecting wisdom that may have conventionally been contained within a single lineage. For example, trauma therapy, Indigenous justice, theology, or mystical traditions all have the opportunity to complement one another, helping us expand beyond the limits of our current ways.

Quality of Community Matters

It’s not enough just to ‘have community’; the quality and intentionality of the spaces practitioners enter are paramount.

Intentional communities structure their time around shared values and hold their members accountable to an agreed-upon set of ethical commitments. These gatherings are more than professional networking events – they’re opportunities to connect, grow, and support one another in becoming the best practitioners we can be. And that means acting in alignment with values and guidelines and centering responsible stewardship.

It’s also important to remember that community is built over time – this means the same group committing to showing up over and over again. This repetition helps deepen the group bond and create a container of trust and safety.

So, when you enter a new psychedelic practitioner community space, or consider setting one up yourself, consider:

How is this space structured? What are the commitment requirements for members? Which values are front and center? Are people showing up as clean mirrors for one another? 

How to Find and Build Community

If you are a psychedelic practitioner who’s seeking to find (or build your own!) community, here are some practical ways you can do so:

• Opt for cohort-based training programs that are rooted in community and offer in-person, group practicums and experiences (like the ones we offer at Elemental Psychedelics!)

• Join online communities that are designed to support psychedelic professionals, such as Psychedelic Guide Network or Psychedelic Medicine Association (if you are a medical practitioner). Events like the Psychedelic Professionals Networking Club by Studiodelic can help you connect with other aligned practitioners.

• Find practitioner hubs and societies in your local area, such as The Nowak Society in Colorado. Many cities also have their own psychedelic society – find yours or create one yourself through Global Psychedelic Society.

• Attend psychedelic conferences such as MAPS’ Psychedelic Science conference, Psychedelic Culture, or Breaking Convention. 

• Start your own peer support group. Use community platforms (such as www.meetup.com) to find practitioners in your local area, or tap into alumni communities you’ve been a part of, and reach out to ask if they’d like to form a peer supervision or support group.

Ultimately, community is not a luxury in psychedelic practice. It’s a necessary foundation for ethical, safe, and transformative work. 

Let’s commit to nurturing community spaces and showing up for one another, so we may build a psychedelic space that’s rooted in responsibility and heart.

Interested in joining a psychedelic training program that prioritizes community connection and support? Take a look at our Mushroom Facilitator Training Program and Ketamine-Assisted Therapy Training.