A tripsitter supports your psilocybin journey by holding space and ensuring safety — not directing the experience. Choose someone trustworthy, emotionally mature, and ethical. Ask about their experience, boundaries, and approach. Trust your gut above all.
You’re researching next steps on your psilocybin journey and may be feeling overwhelmed with choices in the sea of retreats and facilitators. You may be asking: how do I decide who my best choice is? How do I know if someone is a good tripsitter?
Having been in the space for almost eight years and as one of the founders of tripsitters.org, I’ve spent time and had conversations with countless facilitators. I’ve been around great guides I would trust to hold space for my family, and others I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.
Having been in the space for almost eight years and as one of the founders of tripsitters.org, I’ve spent time and had conversations with countless facilitators. I’ve been around great guides I would trust to hold space for my family, and others I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.
I’m lucky to have Leti, my partner, who is the best tripsitter I know. She’s probably tripsat for me about 150+ times by now, and has helped me integrate many challenging experiences. We’ve organized dozens of retreats together and have held space for all kinds of mind-blowing journeys. Leti helps me realize how lucky I am, and how I want other people to have this type of loving care on their journeys.
Many situations have made me question my competency as a facilitator. I’ve made countless mistakes. I’ve learned so many things about what helps and what harms the journeyer.
In this article, we’ll cover everything about having a tripsitter around:
- what a tripsitter does
- what qualities make someone good at it
- how to vet a guide or facilitator
- the questions worth asking before your journey
- what happens when things go sideways
- how much you should expect to pay for one
Whether you're preparing for your first psilocybin experience or your fifth, the question of who holds space for you is one of the most important decisions in your process.
A tripsitter is someone who remains present during your psilocybin journey to ensure your psychological and physical well-being. The role shifts throughout the experience in ways that are hard to anticipate until you're in the middle of it.
At different points in the journey, your sitter might resemble a babysitter, a nurse, a sweet friend, or a quiet parental figure. Their job is to stay non-judgmental and fully present.
They're not there to direct your experience, interpret your visions, or nudge you toward a particular emotional destination. A good sitter follows your lead. They are patient. They don't push, rush, or force. They are grounded, and not trying to get anything from you or the experience.
We can describe a sitter’s mindset as "non-doing." You and the medicine are doing the work. Their role is to hold space, keep the environment safe, be available when needed, and trust the process.
At times, they might sit quietly in the corner while you move through something internal. You may even forget they are there.
At other times, they might hold your hand, help you to the bathroom, adjust a blanket, offer water, or smile at the right moment. You might perceive them as a therapist, a teacher, an angel, or a gift. When Leti tripsits for me, there are often moments when I see her as a precious jewel.
The best trip sitters help us feel safe. As psychologist Stephen W. Porges writes, “Basically, when humans feel safe, their nervous systems support the homeostatic functions of health, growth, and restoration, while they simultaneously become accessible to others without feeling or expressing threat and vulnerability.” When we feel safe, we can open up, break down, reveal our innermost thoughts and struggles without fear.
An effective guide helps you feel more confident and self-sufficient. They listen and point you back to yourself, because you have everything within you to move through your experience. As Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts, says, “Healing is a reminder of what we already are and what we have always been part of.”
Your tripsitter is there to support your process, not to become the main character in it.
When looking for a tripsitter, we practice tuning into and trusting our gut. Our body often knows before our brain catches up.
That said, there are specific qualities worth noticing in potential guides. The best sitters are:
- open
- kind
- humble
- service-oriented
- gentle
- spiritually mature
- compassionate
They're curious about your experience without assuming they know what you’re going through or what’s best for you. They won't project their idea of and push you toward what they think the journey should look like.
Emotional maturity is an important quality. A good sitter has done their own inner work. They're used to the intense and wild emotions that can arise during these journeys.
As Kylea Taylor writes in The Ethics of Caring, “To stay balanced and grounded during a flood of grief, an inferno of anger, or the epiphany of elation, a professional must have faced his own fears about deep emotional feeling and expression. In other words, he has come to a place where he can personally identify with the release the client is experiencing, without being at the effect of the client’s or his own fear of it.”
That calm steadiness can inspire you when things get tough during the process.
A competent guide listens more than they speak. They have no need to sell themselves or impress you. You'll feel like they have space in their heart for you.
First, consider what kind of support you're actually looking for. You have a wide range of choices: from a trusted friend or family member, to a professional retreat organization.
A close friend brings familiarity and love, which can make it easier to let go. A professional brings experience with the specific challenges that arise in psychedelic journeys.
What matters most is trust, rapport, and what researchers call therapeutic alliance, a sense of genuine connection and safety between you. Two separate studies, conducted by Adam W. Levin et al. and Roberta Murphy et al., show that a stronger therapeutic alliance predicts lower levels of depression after a psilocybin journey.
So get to know your sitter before the journey. Work with someone you trust fully.
You might want to find out about:
How reverent does the facilitator seem? How much faith do they demonstrate in the mysterious workings of psilocybin? What is their attitude toward the mushrooms and their work as a guide?
Having many personal experiences does not automatically qualify someone to be trustworthy. On the other hand, someone who is spiritually and emotionally mature can be a great tripsitter with just a little bit of psychedelic experience.
If you want to take a big dose of mushrooms, you’ll want to seek a sitter who has experience holding space for these types of journeys. You may want to ask your potential sitter: What's the most challenging experience they've supported and how did they handle it?
Look for lived experience and the confidence that comes along with it.
Do your research. Many experienced guides and organizations have some kind of internet presence. If they don't, you might want to ask for references.
Keep in mind that just because someone does not have a nice website, doesn’t mean they are inexperienced. Some of the best guides operate entirely through referrals and are known only to their clients and a small circle of trusted associates.
Facilitators who emphasize the importance of preparation and integration understand the full arc of psychedelic work.
Preparation helps build trust with your guide before the journey, which tends to make ceremonies more effective. You’ll also understand your own intentions better. Integration helps you feel supported and heard afterward. It’s how you carry the experience forward into your life.
The more care you receive before and after the journey, the more likely you’ll experience lasting benefits.
Ethics is a paramount issue when considering a tripsitter. Small ethical slips can have far-reaching consequences when working with these medicines.
Ask yourself:
- Does the guide feel grounded? Do you feel safe around them?
- Are they pointing you back to yourself?
- Do they listen more than they speak?
- What kind of agreements do they make with clients around boundaries, consent, and touch?
A competent facilitator will welcome these questions.
Above all, listen to your intuition and trust it. If something feels off before the journey begins, take a pause.
Some facilitators will microdose during a session to tune in to the energetic field. Others, particularly in ceremonial contexts, may take larger doses alongside you. Some remain completely sober throughout. None of these approaches is categorically right or wrong.
What matters is the intention behind the choice. Why is the facilitator dosing? Does it genuinely aid their ability to support you? A facilitator microdosing to stay more attuned and present is different from one who doses for more selfish reasons.
You might want to ask:
- What will you take, if anything, during our session? Why?
- How does it affect your ability to support me?
Make sure you know what your guide will do on the ceremony day before you commit to working with them. A good facilitator will welcome the question without defensiveness.
Before any session, have conversations about expectations and agreements. Some questions you may want to ask:
- What is the sitter's role? Passive presence, active support, or somewhere in between?
- What kind of physical contact is welcome?
- What happens if you want to change settings mid-journey, go outside, or need something that wasn't planned for?
- What are the limits of what the sitter can offer?
- What would require outside help?
Beyond logistics, discuss what the journey might look and feel like, especially if it's your first time with a particular guide. A good facilitator will share what they've observed in other journeys, what they'll do if you become distressed, and how and when they will communicate with you.
Agreements around boundaries, consent, and appropriate touch are worth asking about. Don't skip this conversation out of awkwardness. Building a sense of safety with these conversations before ceremony day arrives is key to feeling safe and comfortable during the experience.
Kylea Taylor says, “Clients who are stepping into the unknown territory of emotional intensity, retrieved memory, and profound spiritual experience need a safe setting. Even more than clients in ordinary therapeutic work, they need a context of trust in their environment and the person or persons who are with them. When these therapeutic agreements are clear and a therapeutic alliance feels trustworthy, the client can risk inner explorations.”
The most likely challenge is a psychological difficulty and not a medical one. Intense fear, grief, anger, confusion, or other delusional states are not uncommon during a journey.
This is often where the most important work happens. A difficult experience is often a revelation of things that have been buried. Perhaps it’s shame, guilt, grief, or rage, emotions that your system has long been suppressing or avoiding.
“I have learned that the only way out of pain is to stop running from it; to meet it, sit with it, feel it, and see what it has to teach you. Pain is an incredible teacher,” says Sherri Mitchell, the author of Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change.
This process can be intense and shocking. A calm, steady sitter can make all the difference between a challenging journey that becomes transformative and one that feels like it wasn’t held well.
What a sitter should do during difficulty:
- reduce stimulation
- stay physically present
- speak slowly and calmly
- offer grounding anchors
The sitter should not argue with what the journeyer is experiencing, or try to fast-forward through it. It’s important for the sitter to feel regulated, as our nervous systems are contagious, in both directions. If the sitter stays grounded, that groundedness becomes available to you, the journeyer.
Knowing that a reliable and mature tripsitter can respond if something goes wrong can relax the mind before and during the journey.
We keep repeating the importance of a sense of safety. Here is what Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, says: “If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.” Make sure you feel safe around your tripsitter.
It varies significantly based on factors such as their location, values, and socioeconomic status.
Some facilitators have completed formal psychedelic-assisted therapy training programs. They may or may not have much experience with psilocybin, or with holding space for others. Some training programs are more rigorous than others.
From my personal experience, I’ve noticed that many of these training programs do not fully prepare their graduates for the realities of life as a professional psychedelic guide. Paying for and learning in a controlled setting is completely different from building a practice and working with complete strangers.
Some guides are licensed mental health professionals who have added facilitation to their practice. Others come from spiritual or indigenous lineages, some of which may have been working with psilocybin and other medicines for centuries.
In my experience, some of the most effective guides have little to no formal training at all. A facilitator's academic or clinical background doesn't necessarily correlate with their ability to support you through a psilocybin journey.
What matters most is their lived experience, their emotional and spiritual maturity, their ethics, and their presence. Ask about their background. An experienced facilitator will exude a calm and gentle confidence.
Possibly. We advise some honest self-reflection first.
Some trusted family members can serve as excellent sitters. Familiarity, genuine love, and an established sense of safety can make it far easier to surrender to the process. Knowing that someone who deeply cares about you is in the room can help you relax.
On the other hand, family relationships can be complex. Unresolved dynamics between you can surface during the journey. A parent sitting for their adult child may struggle not to parent. A partner may find it hard to simply witness without trying to fix.
If you're considering asking a family member to tripsit, be honest with yourself about the relationship. Have conversations beforehand to clarify intentions and boundaries. Make sure they genuinely want to do this instead of feeling obligated.
Sometimes family members who have little experience with mushrooms can become very anxious during a journey, which causes you the journeyer to worry as well. If a family member is worried even before a journey, I would advise seeking someone else if you want to take a high dose.
It’s all up to you. Your ability and willingness to invest in a tripsitter impacts your options.
The vast majority of professional tripsitters and retreat organizers will ask for compensation, ranging from a few hundred dollars to many thousands.
You might be wondering if it’s worth it to pay someone just to sit with you.
You might think of it like climbing a high mountain for the first time. You'd want to prepare thoroughly, gather the right equipment, and seek guidance from experienced climbers. You might even want a professional guide who can help keep you safe on the ascent. Of course, you could totally do it yourself, but you’ll probably run into issues you couldn’t foresee.
The same logic applies here. Working with someone skilled in helping others navigate altered states can make the difference between a journey that helps you and one that overwhelms you.
For some, the value of having a skilled guide becomes clear only in hindsight. Once you experience the intensity of a psychedelic experience and the difficult emotions that it can bring up, your perspective may shift.
Rather than thinking of it as "paying for a session," it may be helpful to reframe it as an investment in yourself. And as a thank you for someone who puts everything aside to tend to your best interests.
You may be lucky enough to be friends with a guide who doesn't charge anything at all. In fact, many "professionals" begin their journey as trusted confidants who listen well and care deeply. People are naturally drawn to them for support and advice about psychedelics.
Be realistic if your budget is limited. You’ll want to explore free online communities and forums, connect with trusted friends who are experienced with psychedelics, or start with smaller doses that require less active support. You can build your confidence gradually.
When you’re choosing a guide to work with, make sure they’re reliable, mature, and an excellent listener. The clearer your intentions, the more clearly you'll be able to understand theirs.
Choosing the right tripsitter is one of the most meaningful choices you can make in your psilocybin journey. Even though you have life-changing experiences without one, having a trusted person by your side can make difficult moments easier to deal with.
You feel safer to explore parts of your psyche that scare you because you know you're held. And your path naturally feels more connected to the whole because your tripsitter is part of your story.
If you’re exploring having a tripsitter around, take your time. Ask questions that feel slightly uncomfortable. Trust your gut. And approach whomever supports you with genuine humility and gratitude, because the first impression sets the tone for everything that follows.
If you feel like we can be helpful on your journey, feel free to book a free intro call.
Wishing you safe and beautiful journeys.
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