Exploring the role of psilocybin-assisted support, ceremony, nature, and human connection in caring for the whole person living through cancer.
A cancer diagnosis can change the way a person experiences their body, their relationships, and their understanding of the future. Medical care necessarily focuses on diagnosis, treatment, and physical health. Alongside that essential work, there is another dimension of care: tending to the emotional, psychological, and existential experience of the person living through it.
That person arrives with a life already in progress. With relationships, memories, hopes, fears, and ways of making meaning. With a history of inhabiting their body long before illness entered the picture. With things they love and things they may be afraid of losing.
Research into psychedelic-assisted therapy has begun exploring whether psilocybin, when administered within carefully structured and psychologically supportive conditions, may help people navigate some of the distress associated with cancer.
At Inner Grove Collective, this emerging field of research intersects with a longstanding philosophy of care: a person is always more than the circumstances they are living through.
What does research tell us about psilocybin and cancer-related distress?
Modern research into psilocybin-assisted therapy for people with cancer has focused primarily on anxiety, depression, existential distress, demoralization, and quality of life.
Two randomized controlled trials published in 2016 helped establish the contemporary evidence base.
In a Johns Hopkins study involving 51 participants with life-threatening cancer diagnoses and symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, a high dose of psilocybin administered within a structured, psychologically supportive protocol was associated with substantial reductions in depressed mood and anxiety. Researchers also observed improvements in quality of life, meaning, and optimism, with many of the measured changes persisting at six months.
A separate NYU study involving 29 participants found reductions in anxiety and depression, alongside improvements in cancer-related demoralization, hopelessness, spiritual well-being, and quality of life. At approximately six and a half months, 60–80% of participants continued to demonstrate clinically significant reductions in depression or anxiety.
These findings are encouraging, although the studies were relatively small and involved carefully selected participants receiving substantial psychological support. They cannot establish that similar outcomes will occur for everyone, or that psilocybin is appropriate for every person navigating cancer.
Importantly, this research concerns the psychological and existential dimensions of illness. Psilocybin is not a treatment for cancer itself, and psychedelic-assisted support does not replace oncology, psychotherapy, psychiatric care, or other appropriate medical treatment.
What this research opens is a broader conversation about how people experience serious illness and what forms of support may help them remain connected to themselves and their lives.
When the body becomes something we have to think about
Serious illness can profoundly change the experience of having a body.
A body that was once largely lived through may become something measured, scanned, treated, monitored, and worried about. Its sensations can acquire new meanings. Ordinary discomfort may become a source of concern. Physical changes may affect identity, independence, and the familiar experience of being oneself.
For some people, this can create a sense of estrangement from their own bodies.
One Inner Grove participant, reflecting on several years that included cancer treatment and multiple surgeries, described feeling as though her body had unexpectedly turned against her.
Yet one of the most meaningful things she reported after her psychedelic experience was remarkably simple: she had felt comfortable in her body.
She compared the sensation to the way a young child moves, stretching an arm or shifting position without thinking about appearances or whether the body is occupying space correctly. She described listening to how her body wanted to be and allowing herself to move accordingly.
After years of surgeries, recovery, and having to think so much about her body, the absence of self-consciousness felt deeply satisfying.
There is something valuable in this account that goes beyond the language of healing or transformation.
For a period of time, her body was no longer primarily something to evaluate, manage, or correct. It was simply a place to be.
This is not an outcome that can be promised or generalized from one experience. It does, however, offer a compelling illustration of what a different relationship with the body might feel like.
Acceptance does not require someone to love what their body is doing, or to reframe a difficult experience into something positive. Sometimes it begins with the possibility of inhabiting the body without continually evaluating it.
Making room for emotion without requiring resolution
Psychedelic experiences are often described in the language of breakthroughs, revelations, or emotional release. While these experiences can occur, such descriptions may unintentionally create expectations about what a meaningful psychedelic experience should look like.
At Inner Grove, the intention is not to produce catharsis or require a particular emotional outcome.
Fear, anger, grief, gratitude, and joy may all arise. Some experiences are deeply emotional; others are quiet, sensory, or difficult to describe. The absence of a dramatic revelation does not make an experience less meaningful.
The participant who described becoming more comfortable in her body also reported substantial emotional release. Yet her most interesting observation during integration was not that her difficult emotions had disappeared.
She explained that she was still experiencing intense feelings, but felt more comfortable allowing them to move through her. She described a sense that an emotional pathway had opened.
Her account suggests a possibility worth exploring: the value of an experience may lie not in eliminating difficult emotions, but in changing how someone relates to them.
For a person living with cancer, fear may remain entirely understandable. Grief may coexist with gratitude. Uncertainty may persist even during moments of peace.
Support does not need to promise freedom from those experiences to offer something meaningful.
Receiving care without losing agency
Serious illness can change the balance between independence and receiving.
Help may become necessary in unfamiliar ways: transportation, meals, medical appointments, physical assistance, and the concern of loved ones. For someone accustomed to caring for others or managing life independently, receiving can bring its own vulnerability.
Before her Inner Grove experience, one participant described herself as independent to a fault and acknowledged how difficult it was to ask for help.
She also shared a memory from her cancer treatment. After a double mastectomy, her spouse helped wash her back when she could not reach it herself.
Her description was brief:
“I’ve never felt more vulnerable or loved.”
During her psychedelic experience, this relationship with receiving appeared again.
At one point, she wanted someone to hold her hand but found herself unable to ask. When care was offered without requiring her to organize or explain it, she experienced that support as deeply comforting. During another emotionally intense moment, the quiet presence of a facilitator helped her settle and return to her breathing.
Her reflections reveal something important about the role of facilitation.
Attentive support involves understanding when to offer reassurance, when to remain quiet, and how to respect a person's autonomy while remaining available. Touch, when welcomed and explicitly consented to, may be one form of support. Presence, listening, and allowing space can be equally meaningful.
Receiving care need not diminish independence or dignity.
Sometimes it offers an opportunity to experience support without feeling responsible for managing everyone else's experience of giving it.
Nature as part of the experience
Nature is central to the Inner Grove approach to psychedelic support.
The natural environment offers sensory experiences that require no explanation: changing light, moving air, birdsong, the texture of the ground, the warmth of sunlight, or the movement of clouds.
In psychedelic research and practice, the concept of set and setting recognizes that a person's mindset, expectations, relationships, and surrounding environment can influence an experience. Nature is one possible element of a supportive setting, although its particular benefits in psychedelic-assisted cancer care have not been firmly established.
Within the Inner Grove philosophy, nature offers an opportunity to shift attention away from constant evaluation and toward direct experience.
For someone whose days have become organized around appointments, decisions, results, and uncertainty, noticing what is happening in the present can offer a different way of relating to time.
There is no particular insight to achieve by watching the light change or feeling the ground beneath one's feet.
The experience of being present can be valuable in itself.
Nature can also remain part of integration. One participant described taking a day after her psychedelic experience to hike, rest, and enjoy time outdoors before returning to ordinary responsibilities.
The experience did not end with the psychedelic session. The following day offered an opportunity to return gently to familiar rhythms of movement, attention, and daily life.
Ceremony as a way of marking a threshold
Ceremony provides another dimension of the Inner Grove experience.
Inner Grove founder Alisa Tongg is an ordained minister, life-cycle celebrant, and practicing citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her Call to the Seven Directions is rooted in her own heritage and ceremonial practice, with language shaped by the person and circumstances being held.
Every Inner Grove experience begins with a Call to the Seven Directions.
The ceremony creates an intentional entrance into the experience through orientation, attention, and relationship with the natural world.
East invites beginnings and illumination. South calls attention to life force, courage, and tenderness. West makes room for movement and release. North offers endurance, patience, and rest. Above widens perspective toward mystery and connection. Below returns attention to the earth and the experience of being held. Within invites a return to the self.
These qualities are not offered as a prescribed formula. The ceremony is a living practice, shaped through preparation and the relationship between the facilitator, the person, and the moment.
For someone preparing to begin cancer treatment, the language may acknowledge courage without demanding fearlessness, tenderness toward the body without requiring acceptance of illness, and the possibility of receiving support without losing agency.
Nature is integral to how the ceremony is experienced. The body turns toward the directions. Attention moves between earth and sky, outward surroundings and inward experience. The ceremony is embodied rather than simply spoken.
At the close of the psychedelic experience, the directions are revisited in gratitude.
The closing does not require someone to determine what the experience meant or whether anything has been resolved. It provides a way to acknowledge what has occurred and mark the transition back into ordinary life.
For one participant preparing to begin cancer treatment, the closing included these words:
My body may be entering a season of treatment and change.
I remain whole.
Wholeness does not require an unchanged body. It does not mean freedom from illness, uncertainty, or fear.
It recognizes that illness, however significant, does not encompass the entirety of a person.
Preparation, experience, and integration
Inner Grove approaches psychedelic support through a three-part arc:
Preparation → Experience → Integration
Preparation begins with understanding the individual. Alongside medical screening, informed consent, and attention to safety, it offers an opportunity to explore what someone is carrying into the experience.
What feels most present? What helps them feel safe? What relationships are especially meaningful? What is their relationship with nature, spirituality, touch, and receiving care? What might they hope to explore, and what would they prefer to leave open?
For people navigating cancer, preparation must also account for the medical realities of treatment. Medications, treatment-related changes, and physical health conditions may affect the safety or appropriateness of psychedelic experiences. Screening and appropriate involvement of the person's oncology and medical team are essential.
The experience itself is held with attention to safety, consent, environment, and the person's individual needs.
Integration begins afterward, as the person considers what remains meaningful and how it might relate to ordinary life.
It is not an exercise in extracting a lesson from every image or emotion. Some experiences offer immediate clarity. Others continue unfolding over time. Some remain difficult to explain.
One participant described returning to meditation and breathing practices after her experience. She had found these practices helpful in allowing difficult emotions to move through her, and wanted to make them a more regular part of her life.
The value of integration lies in helping a person explore what, if anything, they wish to carry forward.
A psychedelic experience may offer a temporary shift in perspective. Integration provides space to consider how that experience relates to the ongoing work of living.
Making space for the person inside the diagnosis
The emerging research on psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer-related psychological and existential distress offers reason for continued investigation. It also requires care in distinguishing promising findings from established treatment.
The larger question extends beyond psychedelics.
What does it mean to care for the whole person during a period when so much attention must necessarily be directed toward illness?
It may mean creating a space where the body can be experienced rather than continually evaluated. Where fear can be acknowledged without becoming the entire story. Where receiving care can coexist with agency, and where relationships, nature, ceremony, and meaningful human connection can offer ways of remaining present.
It means recognizing that a person living with cancer may also be experiencing beauty, humor, pleasure, love, curiosity, and gratitude, alongside grief and uncertainty.
Medical treatment has the essential responsibility of addressing disease. Psychological, emotional, and spiritual support can attend to other dimensions of the experience.
At Inner Grove, the intention is to make room for all of it.
To care for the whole person, including the parts of them that were never sick.
Research & References
The following peer-reviewed publications provide the research foundation for this article. Individual Inner Grove participant experiences are included as personal accounts, not clinical evidence of efficacy.
Griffiths, R. R., Johnson, M. W., Carducci, M. A., et al. (2016). “Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial.” Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12), 1181–1197.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881116675513Ross, S., Bossis, A., Guss, J., et al. (2016). “Rapid and sustained symptom reduction following psilocybin treatment for anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized controlled trial.” Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12), 1165–1180.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881116675512Agrawal, M., Richards, W., Beaussant, Y., et al. (2024). “Psilocybin-assisted group therapy in patients with cancer diagnosed with a major depressive disorder.” Cancer, 130(7), 1137–1146.
https://doi.org/10.1002/cncr.35010Beaussant, Y., Tarbi, E., Nigam, K., et al. (2024). “Acceptability of psilocybin-assisted group therapy in patients with cancer and major depressive disorder: Qualitative analysis.” Cancer, 130(7), 1147–1157.
https://doi.org/10.1002/cncr.35024
Important Information
Psilocybin is not an approved treatment for cancer and should not replace oncology, psychiatric treatment, psychotherapy, medication, or other appropriate medical care. Research into psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer-related psychological and existential distress remains developing. Individual outcomes vary, and no psychological, emotional, spiritual, or physical benefit can be guaranteed.
People undergoing cancer treatment may have medical conditions, medication interactions, or treatment-related considerations that affect the safety or timing of psychedelic experiences. Appropriate screening, informed consent, medical coordination, and compliance with applicable laws are essential.
