FAQ

Psychedelic journeys are a serious responsibility, and we try to empower everyone to use care and respect when taking these journeys. As with many things in life there is no way to guarantee a particular outcome; ultimately we are sharing with the world what we have found helps create meaningful and positive experiences for ourselves, our friends, loved ones, and community. Through our trips, we aim to cultivate art, gratitude, presence, and connection.

We encourage everyone to view our resources for harm reduction and best practices in order to start your trip on a solid footing.

We wish to benefit the psychological and emotional well-being of everyone who partakes in an Unfold trip, and make our best effort to set up fellow travelers with the ideal context for a positive experience. Trips that result in lasting harm are extremely rare for those taking a common dose of well-known psychedelics with loved ones in a comfortable setting with no medical contraindications. We conceive of these risks as similar to or less than the risks of making a journey by car, going on a hike, or playing a sport.

Ultimately it is each participant’s personal decision to consider risks and responsibilities before partaking in any activity. We encourage everyone to view our resources for harm reduction and best practices, which include suggestions for handling challenging trips as well as hotlines for trip sitting, psychedelic peer support, and mental health.

Experiences that are difficult in the moment can also be a source of insight and personal growth, and this can be an integral part of a psychedelic trip. This may come in the form of Type II fun, or in the form of an emotional challenge that involves the untying of difficult knots.

No. A guide requires personal rapport and presence that an inanimate kit cannot provide.

A guide can be an incredibly important part of the psychedelic experience, and we recommend a sober guide or sitter for anyone who is new to psychedelics, planning a particularly deep trip, or would feel more comfortable with a guide for any reason.

For those who choose to go on a trip without a dedicated guide, an Unfold kit is a way to add intentionality to the experience. We recommend reading our harm reduction and best practices guide to help you take such journeys safely and responsibly.

A trip kit is no replacement for a guide’s own experience, but a guide may wish to incorporate an Unfold kit to add structure, inspiration, and interactivity to a journey. Such a guide could join in the activities of the trip as both participant and facilitator, or could guide the trip without partaking.

Unfold’s formative philosophical and intellectual anchors include art, experience design, psychotherapy, clinical research, Buddhism, nonviolent communication, and various embodiment practices.

We have enormous respect for the psychedelic traditions practiced by many cultures throughout history and across the world, and while we are grateful that our paths intersect, we do not wish to modify or replicate traditional practices.

We encourage any fellow travelers choosing a traditional plant medicine to consider its ecological sustainability.

Unfold uses AI tools to create some of the visuals on our social media accounts and in our kits. There is an ongoing debate about the ethics of using large text-to-image models trained on all the art and imagery of the modern internet and human history. These models benefit from the collective work of all artists, and can also be used plagiarize the style of an individual artist's work.

We are strict about not copying the styles of artists. We mostly use stylistic descriptors in our prompts, and when we do take inspiration from artists, we only do so as part of a mix of other prompt elements and ensure that the end result does not resemble their work.

At the heart of this debate is the matter of supporting artists so that they can make a living doing their work. One of the things we're most excited about with Unfold is including the work of artists and artisans in our kits, placing bulk orders with them and exposing new fans to their work. All of our kits include a card crediting the creators of items in that kit.

When it comes to digital art, we have and will continue to commission work from designers and artists, but ultimately we are a small business bringing our vision to life on a budget while creating a product that's affordable for our customers. Generative AI helps us do that. As Unfold grows, we look forward to more and more opportunities to support the many artists whose work we love.