Zendo SIT: Course Overview
to complete before Session 1
including course recordings, handouts, resources, and other training materials
Course Overview
Zendo SIT prepares participants to sit with and offer compassionate peer support to someone navigating a challenging psychedelic or other non-ordinary experience.
Rooted in psychedelic harm reduction, SIT teaches a non-directive approach to support: tending to safety, staying present without taking over another person’s experience, supporting rather than suppressing difficult emotions, and recognizing that challenging experiences are not necessarily harmful experiences.
Throughout the course, participants explore Zendo Project’s Four Principles of Psychedelic Care:
The training emphasizes compassion as an orientation to peer support and develops participants’ capacity for presence, self-awareness and regulation, attunement, listening, curiosity, boundaries, and discernment. Participants learn not only how to support another person, but how to notice what they themselves are bringing into the interaction and how their presence can shape the space.
Participants learn to apply the Four Principles across a range of situations, understand the scope and boundaries of psychedelic peer support, and explore when and how additional support may be appropriate.
Educational Approach
SIT integrates principles and practices informed by trauma-attuned care, cultural humility, nervous system awareness, and relational approaches to supporting people through challenging experiences. Throughout the training, participants explore capacities, skills, and practical tools that support psychedelic peer support. The course provides opportunities to understand these elements, see them demonstrated, and practice applying them across different situations.
Rather than providing a script or a single “right” response, SIT offers a framework participants can continue to practice and build upon while learning to respond to the person, context, and experience unfolding in front of them.
Teaching Methods
SIT combines instructor-led teaching with experiential and applied learning, including:
- Video demonstrations of peer support interactions
- Small-group exercises + scenario-based practice
- Experiential practices that support self-awareness + grounded presence
- Live Q&A with SIT educators
- Guided reflections
Pre-Course Learning
Prior to the live training, participants complete approximately one hour of pre-course learning videos that introduce foundational concepts and shared language used throughout SIT.
Foundations of Psychedelic Harm Reduction & Peer Support
An introduction to psychedelic harm reduction, the role of peer support, and the values and approach that inform Zendo Project’s model of care.
Psychoactive Drugs 101
Foundational information about commonly encountered psychoactive substances and factors that can influence psychedelic experiences.
Understanding Challenging Psychedelic Experiences
An introduction to the range of ways challenging psychedelic experiences may present and factors that can shape how an experience unfolds.
Nervous System Basics
An introduction to nervous system states and the role of self-awareness and regulation in offering grounded, compassionate support.
Peer Support Ethics
Foundational ethical considerations for psychedelic peer support, including role clarity, boundaries, consent, autonomy, and scope.
Foundations & the First Two Principles
The first live session introduces the relational and compassion-based approach that underlies Zendo’s Four Principles of Psychedelic Care and begins building the foundational skills of psychedelic peer support.
Compassion & the Peer Support Approach
Explore compassion as an orientation to psychedelic care, including the importance of presence, distress tolerance, and responding to suffering with care rather than trying to immediately fix or suppress it.
Principle 1: Safe Space
Explore how safety is continually cultivated through attention to ourselves, the person we are supporting, the environment, and the relationship. Participants develop capacities for presence, attunement, environmental awareness, and relational integrity, with practices including self-awareness and regulation, cultural humility, consent, boundaries, and adapting the environment.
Principle 2: Sitting, Not Guiding
Learn a non-directive approach to psychedelic peer support that emphasizes listening, following the other person’s lead, tolerating uncertainty, and noticing the impulse to advise, interpret, or fix.
Throughout the session, participants begin applying these concepts through video demonstrations, guided reflection, and experiential and small-group practice.
Supporting Difficult Experiences
The second live session builds on the foundations of Safe Space and Sitting, Not Guiding, with a focus on supporting people through difficult experiences while staying within the scope and boundaries of psychedelic peer support.
Principle 3: Through, Not Down
Explore how to support someone in turning toward their experience rather than suppressing or avoiding it. Participants practice skills including reflective listening, validation, curiosity, and responding to another person’s level of activation while following the person’s lead.
Principle 4: Difficult Is Not Necessarily Bad
Explore how to relate to challenging experiences without automatically assuming they need to be stopped or fixed. Participants learn approaches for normalizing difficulty, broadening perspective, and holding complexity while remaining attentive to safety.
When Additional Support May Be Appropriate
Explore the boundaries of psychedelic peer support, how to recognize when needs may extend beyond our role or capacity, and considerations for involving additional support.
Participants bring the Four Principles together through video demonstrations, scenarios, guided reflection, and small-group practice.
Course Completion Award
Upon successful completion of Zendo SIT, participants receive a Course Completion Award recognizing their completion of the training. To receive the award, participants must successfully complete all three required knowledge checks: Pre-Course Learning, Session 1, and Session 2. Each requires a passing score of 80%, with unlimited attempts.
The Course Completion Award recognizes completion of Zendo Project’s SIT Course. It does not constitute professional certification, clinical training, licensure, credentialing, or authorization to provide psychedelic-assisted therapy, medical care, or crisis services.
Gratitude & Acknowledgement
Zendo SIT has been shaped by more than a decade of direct experience supporting people in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
We are deeply grateful to the guests who have trusted us to sit with them through challenging experiences, and to the many volunteers, educators, practitioners, and community members whose care, insight, and lived experience have shaped this training over time. This course reflects that collective wisdom and the continued evolution of Zendo Project’s approach to psychedelic care.
We also acknowledge the Indigenous peoples, cultures, and traditional knowledge holders who have stewarded plant medicines and practices of healing and community care across generations. We honor the histories and traditions that long precede the contemporary psychedelic field.