How to make changes from a psilocybin truffle retreat last – 5 effective practices for 2025

After a psilocybin truffle retreat, the real work begins: integrating the profound insights, emotions, and experiences into your everyday life. While the retreat itself provides a structured and supportive environment for exploration, the changes it catalyzes can fade if not intentionally nurtured. To ensure that the benefits of your journey last, it’s essential to adopt practices that help maintain and deepen the transformations you’ve experienced.
In this article and based on our experience, the Evolute Institute team explores and proposes five impactful steps you can take after a psilocybin retreat to sustain your growth, strengthen your connection to your insights, and continue your path towards wholeness.

1. Get 1:1 guidance and support to work on the issues close to your heart

Significant inner changes can happen during a psychedelic experience if certain conditions are met: Preparation is key and should be done with care and earnestness. During the journey itself, having a strong holding container with loving support and presence is crucial. This includes attuned interventions by professional guides and experienced space holders. After the experience, it is essential to make sense of it through reflective, dialogical, and somatic practices. Doing this in a small, trusted group and with the support of guides over the following days and weeks enhances the integration process. However, important shifts might be only of temporary nature or will fade into simple memories of a peak experience if we don’t keep at it and continue or deepen the exploration of important topics (personal and professional questions and matters). Maybe certain issues were brought to our awareness during a psychedelic experience and maybe even partially released, but not fully released or fully processed and brought to completion. Maybe certain aspects of our intention were not explicitly addressed during the psychedelic experience but are connected to certain layers of the experience and only in continued exploration, reflection, and by bringing them into relation can they be adequately resolved. This is why we at Evolute recommend ongoing coaching, counselling or therapy that is trauma-informed and embodied, such as Somatic Experiencing (SE), HAKOMI therapy (see also our article on HAKOMI) or trauma-informed bodywork. The precious window of opportunity of liquified mental and physical patterns and loosened rigidities that extend weeks after a psychedelic experience can be optimally used to deepen the exploration and processing of certain topics such as relational patterns, stuck resentment or grief, reactivity (being easily triggered by certain people), stuckness, or when it comes to translating new ways of being, feeling and perceiving into the professional domain.

2. Connect to Nature (sea, forests, mountains, lakes…)

Many Evolute Institute retreat participants rekindle their relationship with nature during their psychedelic experience, they (re-)discover their connectedness to nature through imagery or sensory experiences connected to the sea, forests/trees/plants, mountains & lakes, and the animal world. They might even realize that they are nature themselves, that their bodies are nature. So nature is not the environment “out there”, but I find nature “in here”, in my body, and in my intrinsic connectedness to the web of life within. This sense of connectedness to nature is a great resource for us in times of stress and difficulty, e.g. when our social relationships – personal or professional – are strained and draining. We can consciously choose to immerse ourselves more often in natural settings or even bring nature home, e.g. by getting more plants or creating an altar using natural objects like stones, wood, or feathers. And those of us who are lucky enough to live close to the wild can go on day-long hiking or camping trips and leave the human world behind in order to connect with the more-than-human world – a contact that can nourish our souls and make us feel the connection to the whole. So by recharging periodically and consciously in and through our connectedness with nature, we can maintain the positive effects of our psychedelic experiences and access core qualities such as calm, expansiveness, aliveness, joy, groundedness, and strength.

3. Spend time to look at your post-ceremony drawing 

As part of our on-site integration activities after the psychedelic ceremony, we invite people to create a drawing/painting using different colors, a mandala of their experience if you like. Even if participants think “I can’t draw/paint”, we remind them that it’s not about being good at drawing, but to simply use a right-brain hemisphere (RH), non-verbal and creative way of expressing their experience where abstract words (left-brain hemisphere) can’t go (see also our deep inner work article on the topic of left vs. right hemisphere). Usually, it’s helpful to turn on the music playlist from the ceremony, reconnect to the present moment, and simply start somewhere on the blank page and let your body/intuition take over to create an expression of your psychedelic journey. This “painting” can be used in our sharing circle on the day after the ceremony (the first of two on-site integration days) and helps represent aspects of the experience that are hard to express in words – it’s a gestalt of the whole 5-hour long psilocybin-truffle experience that the other participants can relate to intuitively. We have had participants who said that after going home they placed the drawing in a place where they see it frequently (bathroom, sleeping room…) and that it helps them re-connect to the key insights and learnings of their psychedelic experiences and helps them keep the memory and lessons alive.

4. Listen to the Psychedelic Retreat Playlist

One of the things people reliably report after attending one of our psychedelic-assisted retreats programs (EvoSHIFT) is that the music playlist from the psilocybin ceremony helps them to reactivate their psychedelic experience and keep alive the feelings, memories and insights connected to it. We have some people listening to our specially curated retreat playlist(s) (thank you, Patrick)!) non-stop in the days and weeks of the retreat, wallowing in the feeling of connectedness, aliveness, and meaning that it provides them. Others listen only here and there to the playlist and prefer other modalities to keep the memory alive and to cultivate an ongoing relationship with their psychedelic experience. As part of our 4-day retreat including multiple modalities/exercises appealing to body, heart, mind, and spirit, we often have a movement/dance exercise that also features an Evolute playlist or a playlist that is co-created with the respective retreat participants (everyone picks a favorite song and explains what it means to them and then everybody senses into the music and its meaning while moving). For example, after the latest EvoSHIFT retreat, we had one participant share in their 1:1 coaching session that it was actually this co-created playlist that helped him keep the memory alive and connect again to the other participants and their experience. He emphasized how he recognized himself very much in the experiences of the other 7 participants even though their psychedelic experiences were quite different from his own, and the music playlist from that session where everybody added one song reminded him of this experiential fractal and our shared humanity.

5. Make integration your own – cultivate the modalities you resonated with during the retreat

Finally, what’s most important for making change last is that you keep in touch with yourself in the days and weeks after the psychedelic retreat experience and cultivate intimacy with what’s nourishing you. Maybe you reach out to your fellow travellers (the other EvoSHIFT retreat participants) in the group chat or bilaterally. Maybe you continue to cultivate the reflective, somatic, dialogical, awareness-based modalities that you were introduced to as part of the on-site retreat (painting, movement, dance, meditation, yoga, resonance sharing circles, journaling, making or listening to music…) or you start rekindling other practices that you know of and have maybe practiced in the past. Maybe you start exploring new awareness-, sensing, somatic, creative or movement practices – we encourage you to create your own ecology of practices that help you re-balance, integrate, and cultivate qualities that are important to you. We firmly believe with Tom Morgan that the re-aligned individual operating in harmony can have a cascading effect on the whole system (see our interview with Tom Morgan) – so the personal change that is for example experienced as part of a psilocybin-truffle retreat journey and then cultivated with integration practices such as those mentioned above is not just “personal”. It is part of a systemic change in how we are with each other, with nature, and with the whole, in short: it is a change in how we lead ourselves, others, and our ecosystems (see also our Evolute leadership model).

Upward, and onward…

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Please bear in mind that we do not provide medical advise and you should always seek assistance from a medical professional before making any decision about consuming psychedelics.