Why Mushrooms: Part 1 of ?

Disclaimer: I am not a healthcare provider of any kind. I am the owner of some very strong opinions based on my own personal experience.

We live in a world where there are coaches for nearly every kind of underachievement you can imagine. Coaches are available to help you use social media more responsibly, manage your household with less resentment and sell your services with less anxiety. You can hire a coach to help you improve how you eat, grieve, fuck, and manage your Airbnb rental. 

Of course, if you prefer to work with a licensed professional, there’s therapy that comes in a wide range of options (many of which I have benefitted from). Among your many choices are EMDR that uses physical stimuli to help your brain process trauma, talk therapy that engages with the voices in your head (IFS), and talk therapy that debunks the voices in your head (CBT).

And, if needed, you can level up into pharmaceuticals. SSRIs increase your serotonin, SNRIs add norepinephrine into the mix, and MAOIs keep those good things in your system longer, though the side effects can be brutal (and might require the introduction of one or more of those coaches).

I recently started subscribing to Joel Bein’s email newsletter where he offered a metaphor that I will wish that I had thought of until the day I die.

Be it books, seminars, talk therapy, meditation, or affirmations, they often alleviate the problems in the short-term (feel better), but you still see the fear or negative self-talk come back.

Let's take affirmation.

Usually, affirmations are like spraying air freshener on the dog doo-doo.

This, my friends, is my answer to “why mushrooms?”

Come with me as I torture this metaphor… if affirmations are like spraying air freshener on dog shit, then…

• Coaching is like getting someone else to show you how move things around so it doesn’t bother you
• Therapy is like learning about why it’s there so that you can accept it
• Meds are like pouring chemicals on the shit to try to dissolve it so you can use the space like it’s not there

In my experience, these are legitimate interventions that can do a lot of work to make the presence of the dog shit suck a LOT less. But we kinda need to be honest that none of these things are going to REMOVE the dog shit.

You know what ACTUALLY CAN remove the dog shit? Mushrooms!! It is the job of fungi on this earth to decompose the last stages of biological life. Mushrooms literally turn that dog turd into soil so that something else can grow!! 

And the metaphor holds.

Psilocybin mushrooms, consumed with intention, guidance and thoughtful integration, CAN get rid of the dog shit in your head.

It turns out our brains, our memories, our selves are more complicated than science can explain. So all of those tools–the therapy, meds, coaching, whatever-they operate just fine on the level that we can understand and talk about.

But what happens when the “dog shit” is subconscious? If you have been conditioned to ignore it then you might have some real blind spots that would let you walk right past it over and over. Or maybe it’s one of those (truly, truly awful) moments where you can smell it, you know it’s there, but you can’t find it! (True story.)

So that’s the first reason: Mushrooms, as a therapeutic intervention, work through a completely different mechanism than any conventional solution. Which, excitingly, might be why there is study after study proving how much more effective they are for treating addiction, depression, and PTSD, just to name a few. [citation needed]

Next week, I’ll talk more about magic mushrooms. In the meantime, learn more about our first psilocybin retreat.

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