Your Psychedelic Journey Starts Before the Ceremony
Most people think the work begins when they take the medicine. What I've discovered — and what your body probably already knows — is that it starts the moment you say yes.
It started with a fire.
I'd rented an Airbnb cottage for my birthday — an annual winter tradition with my closest friends. A coal fell from the fireplace, slipped through a faulty floorboard, hit an electrical wire in the basement, and slowly filled the house with smoke. The fire department came. The house didn't burn down, and everyone was fine. That was within weeks of being sick twice in a single month — the second time so intense I woke up in a cold sweat at 3am wondering what was happening to me.
All things considering, none of this felt like bad luck. It felt like information.
About six weeks before all of this, I had finalized plans to work with Iboga for the second time. And the moment I made that commitment — not the ceremony itself, just the decision — things started surfacing. Old relational patterns. Deep scarcity fears I thought I'd worked through. Layers of my father wound I hadn't touched yet. Arguments with my closest friend. Fires, literal and metaphorical, everywhere I turned.
This is what I now call the pre-work phase. And it's one of the most overlooked — and most important — parts of the entire medicine journey.
Listen to the Source Episode
This post is adapted from Episode 118 of Modern Psychedelics. I recorded this episode while living through my own pre-work phase in the lead-up to my second Iboga ceremony — you'll hear the whole thing unfold in real time. Listen here →
What is pre-work before a psychedelic ceremony?
We talk a lot about preparation in the psychedelic space. The diet. The tapering and detox protocols. Clearing your calendar, reducing substances, setting intentions. That's all preparation: the practical, logistical, conscious work of getting ready.
Pre-work is something different.
Pre-work is the energetic, psychological, emotional content that begins surfacing on its own in the weeks and months before a significant medicine experience. It's not something you initiate. It initiates you. It's the material your unconscious has been holding, waiting for the right moment to be seen. And that moment, it turns out, is the moment you commit to the work.
In my experience — and in the experiences of many people I've worked with and spoken to — the medicine doesn't wait for ceremony day to start. The moment you make that energetic commitment, something shifts. The medicine is already working with you.
It’s like that moment after finals when your body finally feels safe enough to get sick. Except instead of sickness, its the subconscious material that feels safe enough to come up. The pre-work is what you do with that material before your session.
"The work doesn't begin when you take the medicine. It begins when you say yes."
Why is my life falling apart before my psychedelic retreat?
If you're in the pre-work phase right now, there's a good chance life feels like it's getting harder, not easier. Things might be coming apart at the seams — relationships, finances, health, your sense of who you are. You might be getting triggered by things you thought you'd dealt with. Old wounds might be showing up with new ferocity.
Here's the reframe: this is not a setback. This is the medicine showing you your agenda.
Everything that surfaces in the pre-work phase is content. It's the exact psychological and energetic material that wants to be taken into ceremony — the blockages, the limiting beliefs, the unprocessed experiences that are still, quietly, running your life. The medicine is doing you a favor by bringing them forward now, when you can hold them consciously, rather than having them ambush you mid-ceremony when you're in a vulnerable psychedelic state.
What looks like chaos is actually preparation. A deeper, less comfortable kind — but preparation nonetheless.
How do I know if I'm in the pre-work phase?
The pre-work phase can look different for everyone, but there are common patterns I've noticed in myself and in the people I work with. If you have a ceremony coming up and any of the following are happening, pay attention.
SIGN 1
Old wounds resurfacing
Things you thought you'd healed are showing up again — sometimes with the same intensity as before, sometimes with a new layer you haven't seen yet. This isn't regression. It's a deeper layer asking to be explored.
SIGN 2
External chaos
Fires — literal or figurative. Arguments, financial stress, health issues, things falling through. When your inner world is rearranging, the outer world often mirrors it. The chaos isn't happening to you; it's illuminating what's still unresolved within you.
SIGN 3
Getting triggered more easily
If you've done significant healing work and generally feel regulated, and suddenly old triggers are firing again — that's information. Those triggers are your limiting beliefs and conditioned responses rising to the surface specifically to be seen.
SIGN 4
Vivid or symbolic dreams
Dreams often become more active before a ceremony — people from the past showing up, vivid imagery, messages that feel unusually clear. This is evidence that psychological material is moving. I start a dream journal the moment I commit to a ceremony.
SIGN 5
Heightened sensitivity
More awareness of your own energy, other people's energy, your physical body. Some people notice the beginnings of empathic overwhelm, or a deeper ability to feel what's happening in a room. This is the medicine opening you up — it's uncomfortable and also a gift.
SIGN 6
Feeling the medicine's presence
This one is harder to articulate, but I've felt it clearly: a specific energy that feels distinct from the medicine you'll actually consume. With Iboga especially, the spirit of the plant can make itself known before you've eaten a single gram. Waking dream states, a particular quality of awareness, a sense of being watched over — or worked on.
WORK WITH ME
Navigating pre-work is exactly where support makes the biggest difference.
As a Core Energy Coach with extensive personal experience working with Iboga, I help people identify the underlying energetic themes surfacing before a ceremony — so you arrive at retreat already in process, not ambushed by what comes up. I currently have space for new clients.
How do I navigate the pre-work phase before an iboga ceremony?
The most important thing I can tell you is this: the pre-work phase is not something to push through or manage your way out of. It's something to lean into. Here's how I navigate it — and how I guide clients through it.
1. Name it as pre-work
The shift from "my life is falling apart" to "I'm in the pre-work phase" is not just a semantic change — it's an energetic one. When you can name what's happening, you stop resisting it and start working with it. Awareness is the first and most essential step that gives the content purpose.
2. Start tracking what's coming up
The moment I committed to my second Iboga ceremony, I opened a note on my phone and started recording everything — triggers, patterns, themes, dreams, fears. Whatever was moving through me. This becomes the raw material for refining your intention. Don't wait until a week before your retreat to do this work. Start now.
3. Look for themes, not situations
The specific situations surfacing in your life are symptoms. The underlying energetic themes — scarcity, fear of abandonment, the wound beneath the wound — are what the medicine actually wants to work with. Situations are the surface; themes are the root. Pay attention to what keeps coming back in different forms.
4. Enlist support — the right kind
When psychological content around old relationships and relational trauma started surfacing for me in the months before my second Iboga experience, what I needed wasn't coaching — it was therapy (coming from a coach, this is genuine!). I went back to a therapist I trusted and have been meeting with her every other week. The pre-work phase will often make clear which kind of support you actually need: coaching for forward momentum and energetic pattern work; therapy for relational and psychological content that needs clinical space. You might need both.
4. Ground your nervous system
The pre-work phase can be energetically dysregulating. Movement, time in nature, meditation, breathwork, reducing screen time — whatever genuinely brings your nervous system into regulation, prioritize it. Not as a bypass, but as a foundation. You can't do deep inner work from a nervous system that's in constant fight-or-flight.
5. Bring humor where you can
When the Airbnb caught fire, we laughed. Not immediately — but eventually. There is something almost cosmically funny about the things that come up in the pre-work phase, if you can access a bird's-eye view of it all. The universe is winking at you. Wink back. It doesn't make the hard things less hard; it makes them more navigable.
Does the medicine really work before you take it?
I believe it does. And I don't think this is mystical thinking — or at least, not only mystical thinking. When we make a genuine energetic commitment to doing deep inner work, something in us shifts. The unconscious begins to surface what it knows needs attention. We become more sensitized to our patterns, our fears, our unfinished business.
With plant medicines specifically, and with Iboga most intensely in my experience, there's something more happening. These medicines carry a spirit, an intelligence, an energy that isn't limited to the moment of ingestion. The commitment opens a channel. And through that channel, the work has already begun.
If you're in this phase right now — if life feels like a ceremony you didn't sign up for — I want to offer you this: the intensity of your pre-work is proportional to the depth of what wants to be transformed. This is not a bad sign. This is the most alive sign there is.
The chaos isn't a setback. It's the medicine moving you forward.
If you want to go deeper on what it looks like to truly prepare for an Iboga ceremony — both the practical and the energetic — I wrote about that in our guide to preparing for Iboga. And if you're in the middle of the difficult period that can come after a psychedelic experience, the post on what the post-psychedelic identity crisis actually means might meet you where you are. And if the healing vs. integration distinction resonated, this piece on what integration really means goes much deeper.
SUPPORT FOR YOUR JOURNEY
You don't have to navigate this alone.
Whether you're in the pre-work phase, preparing for a first or subsequent ceremony, or integrating after an experience — I offer dedicated 1:1 support for people working with Iboga and other plant medicines. I bring both lived experience and professional training to this work.
Doing the Work with Iboga
1:1 prep and integration coaching for the Iboga journey. Ongoing enrollment. $1,500.
6-Month 1:1 Psychedelically-Informed Life Coaching
Deep integration support woven into a forward-moving coaching container. Limited space. $3,000 or $500/month.
Lana Pribic
Lana is a certified Core Energy Coach, host of the Modern Psychedelics podcast, and someone who has been doing medicine work for over five years — including two journeys with Iboga. She works 1:1 with people who are serious about using psychedelic experiences as a catalyst for real, lasting change.
