Where to Focus Your Attention First After Psychedelic Healing Ceremony

A quick recap of the four planes

If you haven’t come across this before, a four planes conversation is a structured way of mapping what is going on in someone’s energetic system—the aura, or energy body—either after or before a ceremony. It is not therapy; it is more like tracing where things are showing up across four connected areas of a person’s life. The aura has more layers and interactions than just four, but this framework gives a strong first approximation—enough, in my experience, to support meaningful reflection.

• Physical — where tension, pain, or old injury patterns are sitting in the body, sometimes including where seemingly random, recurring injuries keep showing up.
• Emotional — what is being felt alongside the physical experience: grief, fear, anger, or heaviness. I sometimes explore these feelings in relation to specific life events, whether someone consciously remembers them or not. Occasionally, in my experience, this material can seem to trace back even further than this lifetime.
• Psychological — the thought patterns and behaviours accompanying those emotions: scattered focus, over-responsibility, difficulty with boundaries, experiences of anxiety or depression, or trouble sleeping.
• Spiritual — how all of this maps onto the energy system itself, chakra by chakra. I understand chakras as pumps that circulate energy around the entire aura, including the physical body—but they are not the only part of the picture. The aura also has layers that interact with the chakras, and each chakra has a front and rear aspect, which does not get talked about nearly enough. One useful example: I often explore boundary issues through what Barbara Brennan calls the “will centers”—our ability to express ourselves, use our voice, and stand up for ourselves—which sit in the rear aspect of the chakras. The front tends to represent the more raw emotional content itself.

On their own, these four categories are useful. But the real question people have—the one I want to answer properly here—is what to do once you can see all four laid out in front of you. Which one do you start with?

You might have had a genuine root-chakra insight in ceremony—that’s the area low in the spine, between the hips—alongside a wave of ego dissolution, which I often interpret through the solar plexus at the top of the ribcage. Maybe there was also real love, which you associate with the heart chakra, or a sense of connectedness, which you associate with the crown chakra and a connection to divinity and oneness. How do you know which of those relates to the anxiety you want to understand, difficulty trusting people in relationships, or a wish to deepen your connection to the divine? All of that can be genuinely confusing after a ceremony. This is where a Four Planes Pattern Mapping conversation, alongside Reiki, can help me sort out what to explore first in relation to the change someone is seeking.

The order isn’t random—it follows the direction of energy

Here’s the piece I think is missing from almost every integration conversation: within this framework, there is an order of operations, and it is not simply “whichever one feels most urgent”—although there are times that urgency matters. The order follows the direction I understand life-force energy itself to be moving.

Universal energy—what Reiki practitioners call Reiki energy and what other traditions call prana or chi—flows into the human energy system from below in this model, meeting the root chakra first before moving upward through the rest of the system. I do not see that as incidental. Whatever feels blocked at the root may, in a real sense, gatekeep how much energy feels available to everything above it. Working there first is not only about one isolated issue; it may change what feels available to explore elsewhere.

This is why I generally suggest starting with whatever is showing up as a root-chakra theme—fear, safety, early instability, or grounding—even when it is not the loudest or most distressing thing on the list. It is not that the other planes or chakras do not matter. It is that I often read what shows up elsewhere as downstream of what remains unresolved at the root. Within this energetic framework, balancing the root may also change how someone experiences patterns such as overthinking or physical concerns they associate with a higher chakra; it does not promise an outcome, but it gives us a coherent place to begin.

What “downstream” actually looks like

Let me make this concrete, because “downstream” is one of those words that sounds right without necessarily meaning anything until you see it play out.

Here is an anonymized and blended version of the kind of four planes conversation I have regularly:

• Physical plane: Ongoing lower back pain, considered alongside emotional material connected to fear, restriction, freedom, and early influence from a father figure. In my framework, masculine-linked material may be worth exploring alongside recurring experiences on the right side of the body.
• Emotional plane: Sadness or heaviness around the heart, paired with a protective habit of choosing peace over conflict.
• Psychological plane: Scattered focus, rushing, and switching between tasks before finishing any of them.
• Spiritual plane: What I would describe energetically as a blocked heart chakra, alongside real energetic sensitivity.

It would be easy to assume the heart material is the obvious starting point—it is the most emotionally vivid, and heaviness in the heart is usually the thing people describe first when asked what is going on. But tracing it through, I would explore the lower back experience, fear pattern, and early masculine-influence material through the root. That is where I would start, not the heart.

Here is the logic: I would read the heaviness around the heart, the distance-keeping, and even the scattered focus in the psychological plane as potentially downstream of a root-level fear pattern, rather than assuming they are separate, unrelated issues. Starting at the root may change how some of what is showing up higher in the system is experienced, simply because the energetic pattern beneath it has changed. Starting at the heart instead may mean working with the visible expression while leaving the upstream pattern unexplored.

Turning the map into a ceremonial intention

This is where a four planes conversation stops being only a map and becomes something you can use. Once you know which pattern seems to be asking for attention first, you can turn it into a specific, targeted intention—what I call a balancing experience.

A balancing experience is simple in concept: you take the difficult emotion or memory you have identified and ask, specifically, for an experience of its opposite in ceremony. Not a vague “please heal me,” but something concrete. For the fear pattern above, that might sound like: “La Madre, when I was young, X happened, and it caused great fear. Can you show me peace and safety, so I can explore and balance this experience?”

From there, you can move on to other themes surfaced in the same conversation, or carry those same insights into a different modality if you are stepping away from psychedelics for a while or simply cannot get to ceremony. The boundary issues in the example above, for instance, are also connected in this framework to fear and restriction, so that theme could become the intention for a separate ceremony. Another might address difficulty focusing. Another still might be: “Help me understand and forgive my father for the role he played in what I’m working through.” There are usually several real intentions inside one four planes conversation, and it is completely fine to spend more than one ceremony on the same theme if that is what feels right.

If you are finished with ceremony work for now, these same insights can carry into ongoing Reiki sessions, structured journaling, a meditation practice, or talk therapy, if that is the direction you would rather go. The map can give the practitioner or process something specific to work with instead of something general.

Notice what is different here compared with the vague advice you will often hear in integration circles. It is not “set an intention to heal,” “be open to what comes,” or “show me what I need to know.” It is a specific request, aimed at a specific pattern, in a specific order—because the pattern was mapped first rather than guessed at in the moment. You have probably come across the story of the person who has done a hundred ceremonies and had an unusually rough road getting there. I do not believe you need a hundred ceremonies. Psychedelics are one genuinely valuable tool in a much larger toolkit—not the right tool for every part of the journey. This kind of work may draw on several tools, ideally each suited to the specific thing being explored.

For example, you cannot always get to ceremony. Something like Reiki, sound healing, or whatever genuinely resonates with you may offer another way to keep reflecting on the same material in the meantime.

There is also an older idea worth holding onto here: “know thyself.” In my experience, meaningful change often asks for something to be understood well enough to be accepted and—often—forgiven. Usually that begins with forgiveness of yourself more than anyone else, though in time it can extend outward too, which carries its own kind of karmic weight. A four planes session can offer an initial opening of understanding from which deeper exploration becomes possible.

I will also point interested readers to the free journaling platform I built specifically to work with these insights between ceremonies or wellbeing sessions of any kind. It walks you through identifying a memory connected to the pattern you are exploring, then moves through balancing it, understanding it, accepting and mitigating it, and finally forgiving it. The underlying process draws on material channeled by a group called L/L Research beginning in the 1980s, in which an entity identifying itself as “Ra” describes a connection to ancient Egypt. It is a modern channeled source referencing that lineage, not a set of surviving ancient Egyptian texts. I have found it genuinely useful for the kind of “know thyself” work that can help someone move differently through a karmic lesson encountered through suffering or difficult life events.

Why “grounding” alone misses this entirely

I have written about this before, but it is worth repeating because it applies directly to this question. Most psychedelic integration advice treats grounding as a general practice—time in nature, less time on your phone, better sleep. All fine, none of it wrong, and none of it built to identify which plane needs attention first, or why.

When I describe someone as ungrounded, I mean that their energy seems too concentrated in the upper chakras. Grounding practices such as getting outside are one way to begin bringing attention down—but if someone is still unable to distribute that energy into the lower chakras and lower body, a walk in nature may only go so far. Reiki training offers one framework for directing attention and life-force energy into those lower areas through the hands. Short of that, there are specific practices for exploring and redistributing what feels like stuck energy—chanting bija mantras being one example. Each chakra has an associated sound and vibration within this tradition. Chanting the lower three bija mantras is a practice I use to bring attention to those areas so energy that feels stuck up top has somewhere to flow. That is what grounding means to me: doing something specific to bring your energy lower, not only changing your environment and hoping it follows. You could even do both at once—chanting while lying on the grass, if you want to combine the approaches.

Most of the integration world does not think of a person as an energy system with directionality—energy moving from the root upward, with blockages gatekeeping what feels available further up the chain. Without that framework, there is no way to answer “which plane first” with anything more specific than “whichever one feels loudest today.” What feels loudest is not always what seems to be shaping the rest.

This is also why, in my worldview, a chakra carries the particular theme it does. A chakra is not symbolic decoration; I understand it as a meeting point between universal energy and an individual system, and that intersection is what gives it its theme. You could say the universe is structured in particular ways, and as a human being, you are handed particular energetic material to work through as part of your own development—these meeting points are where that material reaches you. The root’s theme is safety and grounding because of where it sits in that structure. Sadness is associated with the heart for the same reason. None of it feels arbitrary to me, and once you can see it that way, “which plane comes first” stops being a guess and becomes something you can trace.

What this looks like in practice

This is what a four planes conversation is built to surface—not just a general sense of “there is stuff to work on,” but a considered order based on where things seem to sit in the system and how they connect. From there, the plan is usually some combination of specific Reiki work on the identified starting point, structured journaling on that same pattern, and—if there is a ceremony coming up—specific intentions built directly from what has been mapped rather than something vague hoped for in the moment.

I come at this from having sat in ayahuasca ceremony myself—nine times, in the Shipibo tradition in Peru—and from training separately in Usui Reiki, where I have now done this kind of mapping work with dozens of people across more than fifty sessions. The two rarely get combined, and I think that is the gap. Not that ceremony does not work, and not that grounding advice is useless—just that neither one, on its own, necessarily tells you what to explore or when.

I see this work as both an art and a science, and I try to bring a bit more structure to it without stripping out its creativity or divine nature. For me, the two together are considerably more powerful than either alone.

If you have had a real ceremony experience and are sitting with a pile of things that all feel as though they need attention, with no clear sense of where to begin, that is exactly what a Four Planes Pattern Mapping session is for. It is not about guessing which one feels loudest. It is about tracing where the energy seems gatekept and starting there. If a session feels like a relevant next step, you can explore the mapping process through that page; if you would rather begin on your own, you can start with the self-assessment.