Psychedelic Co-Journeying is a Shamanic Tradition of Relational Healing
- Amy Nelson
- 18 minutes ago
- 6 min read
My client is feeling like all the wonder is fading. We are standing in a lush, vibrant garden, and they are hunched, almost in tears, staring at a wall of succulents.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“I’m so disappointed. Nothing's happening. They’re all just there. Doing nothing...”
“What should they be doing?”
“I don’t know… something amazing?”
“So them just being isn’t good enough?”
They pause, and something clicks. “HA! I’m judging them, and they are just NATURE. Just being. Perfect as they are. And I come with all these expectations that they're not meeting. That's absurd!”
I add, “… and you are nature too. Just being.”
We pause in that thought.
“I’m just nature… being… perfect... and then I’m judging myself against all these expectations and I’m so disappointed… but I’m NATURE!”
We expanded as we absorbed this beautifully freeing insight, in what became a mantra for deep self-acceptance.
This moment shows something I witness often in psychedelic work. When people enter these states, their stories rise quickly and vividly, yet they're not always versed in the practice of inquiry. One of the ways psychedelics work is by highlighting and exaggerating fear and negative thought patterns so that they can be seen, felt, and ultimately alchemised. But it is just as easy for someone to miss the invitation the medicine is offering, and become trapped inside the fear itself. As a companion, I learn to recognise these moments and gently bring in curiosity, perspective shifts, mysticism, or simple witnessing. While there are far deeper layers that unfold within psychedelic realms, this exchange is a soft, human example of how being lovingly accompanied through painful or frightening moments can be the very thing that allows transformation to happen instead of collapse.
When the nervous system opens this wide, it instinctively searches for cues of safety or threat. If someone is alone in that opening, fear can easily become the loudest voice in the room. When someone is accompanied, however, the body senses another regulated being nearby, and the entire experience begins to reorganise itself around connection rather than defence.
Also, there are moments when psychedelics take us deeper than the psychological and into subconscious, multidimensional, energetic, or ancestral spaces. At times, this may appear as parasitic presences, inherited curses, lodged energetic objects, or soul-contracts that require specific unbinding. When I co-journey, part of my work is tracking the field itself, sensing what is moving within and around us, and listening into the unseen layers where these patterns live and resolve across subtle dimensions.
The Western Paradigm of Healing Alone
One of the inheritances of Western socialisation is the story that transformation is private work. People are taught that they are struggling because they are not good enough. They are told by self-help culture to cope alone, make meaning alone, and rise alone. Growth is framed as something you wrestle with internally and present to the world once it is tidy enough to be spoken aloud.
This socialisation runs deep. It tells people they should be able to self-regulate without support, that healing is a sign of personal strength, and that needing others is a mark of immaturity. Under this belief system, when someone struggles, they often conclude that the fault lies somewhere inside themselves. They feel ashamed for not managing what is, in truth, too large and too layered for one nervous system to hold.
How This Carries Into Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy
When psychedelic-assisted therapy is built on the same architecture, the loneliness intensifies. A person is given medicine, placed on a bed and encouraged to descend inward with very little relational involvement. Even in group settings, participants are often instructed to keep to themselves, stay quiet, avoid disruptive expression, and not speak to anyone.
For some, this creates safety. For others, it becomes a repetition of old wounds. Those who cry loudly, shout, shake, or need human contact can feel as if they are failing. Those who cannot stay neatly contained and bliss out may believe they are too much, too needy. Those who feel overwhelmed may leave with a sense that they did the journey wrong. Group settings can offer profound experiences, yet they can also quietly reinforce abandonment, confusion, and shame for those who need more relational holding than the container allows.
None of this reflects how psychedelic states were traditionally held by the medicine people of the world.
Remembering the Relational Roots of Psychedelic Work
In most shamanic, animist, and ancestral healing lineages, psychedelic experiences were never intended to be solitary. They were relational, communal, and accompanied.
Sangomas speak of stepping into the person’s umoya, their wind, to track where the spirit has been tangled or frightened.
Siberian and Mongolian shamans describe following the soul into the fractured chamber where it became lost.
Curanderas in parts of Central and South America work within the susto field, the place where the spirit has fled.
Amazonian healers speak of travelling through the mariri, the energetic terrain where tangled memories and spirit-knots live.
Himalayan shamans describe being drawn into the person’s dream-space to help restore orientation.
Across these traditions, the principle is consistent. The healer travels inside the experience, close enough to understand the symbolic world the person is walking through, while anchored enough to lead them back.
This is the essence of shamanic tracking. It is the practice of following the subtle movements of a person’s energy, story, and spirit to locate where they became stuck or fragmented, and guiding them back into coherence.
Psychedelic Co-Journeying as a Return to Relationship
My work stands within this older understanding. I offer standard therapeutic support for those who prefer to journey alone while I remain resourced beside them. And I offer co-journeying for those who feel called into a deeper relational field.
When I co-journey, I step into the landscape with the person. I stay oriented, grounded, and supported by my own guides and lineage, yet close enough to sense where their fear contracts or where their energy opens. We meet what arises together. We sit in the stuck places and observe. We hold and move with the grief, cry the tears that need releasing, or expand into the wonder. Sometimes there is shaking and purging. Sometimes there's a rhythm, or a song that arrives. Sometimes your oversoul comes to wake you up to who you are again.
We meet guides, learn from trees, move with deities, or speak to our bodies. We break generational curses with helping ancestors, spirit animals, elements, and magnificent forces. The space becomes intuitive, and the bond feels like a steady drum.
Healing becomes something that lives in relationship, not in isolation.
Shamans Rarely Travel Alone
Across the world, those who work in altered states understand that depth work is held in relationship. Popular culture imagines the shaman as a solitary wanderer disappearing into the unseen without assistance, yet the lived reality inside most traditions is very different. When the trance becomes deep, when the layers of the world thin, when ancestral fields open or entities approach, companionship is considered part of the safety protocol. Not because the shaman is inexperienced, but because the work is relational by nature.
In Southern African healing lineages, the Sangoma often journeys with drummers, singers, or elders nearby. Their presence steadies the body while the spirit travels. In Siberian and Mongolian traditions, the fire keeper or apprentice sits just outside the shaman’s trance, tending the rhythm and ensuring the soul has a clear path home. Amazonian ayahuasqueros rely on trusted assistants to hold the space while they navigate the dense, vine-taught worlds of the plant spirits. Himalayan trance healers are watched for subtle signs of destabilisation and brought back gently if the work becomes too heavy. Curanderas working with susto understand that the energetic currents stirred during extraction are not meant to be managed alone.
These examples all point in the same direction. Even the most experienced practitioners recognise that certain territories require an anchor. Someone stays conscious in the room while another goes deep. Someone witnesses the return. Someone listens for changes in breath or pulse. This is not about hierarchy or rescue; it is a recognition that the unseen is dynamic, and that human nervous systems regulate best in connection.
To travel with another present is not a sign of weakness. It is an act of respect for the terrain and an acknowledgement that no one, regardless of skill, is exempt from the forces encountered in these realms. It is how many lineages have safeguarded their practitioners for generations.
So, Dear Traveller…
If you’ve had a psychedelic experience that left you unsettled, frightened, confused, or carrying impressions that still feel unresolved, you are not alone. Many people have moments inside altered states that linger for years without clarity or integration. You are not weak for struggling. You were simply asked to hold something that was never meant to be carried alone.
If you’d like support integrating a difficult journey, or if you feel called to explore shamanic psychedelic co-journeying as a relational, ancestral, and spiritually held way of travelling, you’re welcome to reach out. We can walk the terrain together, loved one.
Learn more by booking an exploratory call or messaging me directly on WhatsApp.
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