There's a story I keep coming back to — one I heard years ago from a food writer who'd landed, post-breakup, in her dead grandmother's rent-controlled apartment near Coney Island. Her father handed her the keys, a bottle of gin, and a warning: don't turn on the oven. It might explode.

She'd been a cooking-school student. A caterer. Someone who'd built her entire coping mechanism around the kitchen. And now she was stranded in a 1930s apartment with a stove she couldn't use, an hour and a half by subway from anyone she knew, mourning a relationship and a version of herself that had disappeared.

What saved her wasn't the gin. It was a group of small, black-clad Italian grandmothers on Avenue U who took one look at her sad basket of broccoli and a single fig and rolled their eyes so hard she could feel it. “You don't need no oven,” one of them said. “You need to think like a baby, not like a robot.”

They didn't know they were teaching her Zen. But they were.

What “Beginner's Mind” Actually Means

The phrase shoshin — beginner's mind — comes from the Japanese Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, who ran the San Francisco Zen Center until his death in 1971. His most famous line: “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.” It sounds like a fortune cookie until you actually try to live it.

The idea is deceptively simple. Approach whatever you're doing — meditation, cooking, a difficult conversation, a psychedelic ceremony — as if you've never done it before. Drop the expertise. Drop the story about who you are and what you're capable of. Meet the moment fresh.

Anyone who has spent time around plant medicine or long-form contemplative practice knows how hard this actually is. We show up to our third ayahuasca ceremony expecting it to feel like the second one. We sit down on the cushion and immediately compare today's meditation to yesterday's. The mind wants patterns. It wants to be the expert. Beginner's mind asks it to stop, and the mind does not like being asked to stop.

Why This Matters If You're Considering a Retreat

I bring this up because I talk to a lot of people who are researching their first ayahuasca or psilocybin retreat, and there's a particular trap they fall into. They read everything. They watch every YouTube trip report. They memorize integration frameworks and dieta protocols. By the time they arrive at the maloca, they've built such a detailed mental model of what the experience is supposed to be that the actual experience has almost no room to land.

The medicine doesn't care about your research. Ayahuasca in particular has a way of dismantling whatever theory you brought with you, sometimes gently, sometimes not. Facilitators I trust say the same thing in different words: the participants who struggle most are usually the ones who arrived certain they knew what was coming. The ones who benefit most are the ones who came curious.

That doesn't mean don't prepare. Preparation matters — dieta, screening for contraindications, choosing a reputable retreat, sorting your integration plan. But there's a difference between preparing your body and your logistics, and pre-writing the script for what the medicine is supposed to show you. The first is wisdom. The second is a setup for disappointment.

What preparation actually looks like

• Screening — physical health, medication interactions (SSRIs and MAOIs are a serious issue with ayahuasca), mental-health history.
• Dietary prep in the weeks leading up — reducing salt, sugar, meat, alcohol, caffeine, and sexual activity, per traditional guidance.
• Choosing a retreat where the facilitators speak clearly about safety, lineage, and aftercare — not just marketing language about transformation.
• Building an integration plan for the weeks after, ideally with a therapist or integration coach who knows psychedelic work.
• Deliberately not deciding what your ceremony is supposed to reveal.

That last one is the hard one. And it's where the Italian grandmothers come back in.

Every Onion Is a New Onion

What the women on Avenue U were teaching, in their gruff way, wasn't just how to cook without an oven. They were teaching a whole orientation. Shop daily. Buy what's fresh. Cook it that night. Don't assume today's onion will behave like yesterday's onion, because it won't — it was pulled from a different field on a different day and it has its own moisture, its own sweetness, its own timing in the pan.

Every onion is a new onion. Every ceremony is a new ceremony. Every sit on the cushion is its own sit. Every conversation with your partner, your mother, your sponsor is fresh territory whether you want it to be or not.

This is also why people who've done a lot of plant-medicine work often talk about the danger of becoming a “psychedelic veteran.” After enough ceremonies, there's a pull toward becoming the guy at the fire who's seen it all — the one who talks about his experiences with jaguars and grandmother spirits in the same tone a sommelier discusses vintages. The medicine tends to humble that guy pretty quickly. It knows an expert when it sees one.

How to Actually Practice This

Beginner's mind isn't something you achieve. It's something you keep coming back to, usually after realizing you left. A few concrete ways in:

1. Notice the first assumption. When you sit down to meditate, or walk into a ceremony space, or start chopping vegetables — what's the first thing you assumed about what's coming? Just notice it. You don't have to fight it.
2. Ask a stupid question on purpose. If you're at a retreat, ask the facilitator something obvious. Watch what happens in you. There will be a small flinch of ego. That flinch is the expert mind protecting itself.
3. Let the medicine be strange. Whatever you thought ayahuasca was going to be like, it will not be. Whatever your last ceremony taught you does not automatically apply to the next one. Different plant, different night, different you.
4. Debrief without conclusions. After a ceremony or a long meditation, resist the urge to immediately package it into a story. Sit with the raw material for a few days first. The meaning tends to change.

Why Recovery Work Depends on This

A quick word on addiction, because this is where beginner's mind stops being a lovely concept and starts being survival. Ibogaine treatment centers, ayahuasca retreats working with people in recovery, twelve-step communities — they all circle the same insight. The addicted mind is an expert. It knows exactly how tonight is going to go. It has run the movie a thousand times.

The recovery mind, when it works, is a beginner. It treats today as unprecedented. It doesn't assume that because yesterday was clean, today is safe, or because last week was hard, this week will be too. It shows up to the same meeting for the ten-thousandth time and finds one new thing to hear.

Plant medicine, in the best cases, seems to help crack open that expert mind — long enough for a person to remember they have a choice. Whether that opening turns into lasting change depends almost entirely on what happens after: the integration, the community, the willingness to keep meeting each day as a new day.

Back to the Onion

The woman I started this piece with eventually moved out of her grandmother's apartment, back into her life. But she carried the Avenue U lesson with her — into her marriage, into caring for her aging mother, into every book she wrote after. She said, later, that she thought she'd been writing about food all those years. She realized she'd been writing about survival.

That's what beginner's mind is really for. Not becoming a better meditator or a more enlightened ceremony participant, though it helps with both. It's for staying alive to your own life. For not sleepwalking through the parts you think you've already figured out. For letting September be September, even when you're not ready to let go of the side of the pool.

If any of this resonates and you're weighing whether to sit in a ceremony this year, plenty of the ayahuasca, psilocybin, and plant-medicine retreats worth considering can be browsed on our marketplace here. Whatever you choose, try to arrive without a script. Every onion is a new onion. Every ceremony too.