Psilocybin Mushrooms
Psilocybin Mushroom History
Humans have been exploring the psychedelic effects of psilocybin mushrooms for thousands of years. Psilocybin is a naturally occurring plant medicine know for its hallucinogenic effects.
While mental disorders continue to increase globally, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies including psilocybin-assisted psychotherapies have been proven to alleviate some of the challenges that conventional psychiatric medicine and prescriptions have not provided relief.
Psilocybin: Mind Expanding Adventures
My adventures with psilocybin began back in my early twenties when I explored mushrooms with some friends when I lived in Pacific Beach, California. We were able to get some “shrooms” and go out to Anza Borrego desert. These were amazing adventures and even though we weren’t particularly intentional or ceremonially inclined at that age, we at least felt enough of a call to “set and setting” that we would make our way deep into nature to experience this medicine.
The whole experience at Anza Borrego was really cool because we would drive out there, park, and then hike about 5 hours deep into the desert. We’d be climbing over huge rocks and through washed-out gulleys the entire way there. The magical part of all of this is that after the long hike, we’d end up at this oasis in the desert at the base of four “mountains” with several palm trees and a small pool of water. This wasn’t a place found on a trail and I have no idea how we knew it was there to begin with, we certainly didn’t have a map. We just knew what direction to hike and trusted that we’d get there one way or the other, and we always did somehow.
The spot where we would pitch camp with the mountains surrounding it created an amphitheater of sorts and we could feel the energy of the desert, the moon and stars, and all of nature really. I really wish I had a picture of it, but back then cameras weren’t so prevalent and none had a cell phone. I don’t remember a single picture ever taken there, even though we went 5 or 6 times altogether. When Terence McKenna talks about how important “set and setting” is, this was a fucking AMAZING set and setting. Not quite silent darkness, but the next best thing for sure.
Instead of ceremonial reverence for the mushrooms, we were young and clueless and always in more of a recreational mindset, or at least most of us were. I didn’t know anything about the history or ceremonial use of mushrooms at the time and didn’t have any clue about spirituality, awakening, or the true psychological gifts that mushrooms can bring. I was just experimenting and so were the people I was with.
We were usually a group of six or so, and we would just laugh and joke and generally raise hell out there. No one was ever around or even close to being within earshot. We had this game we would play the game with those multicolored lights that you crack. We would throw them around and play tag with them, like some kind of game that we just made up in the moment and we’d find ourselves rolling around in the desert and falling all over the rocks and into cacti. Kind of dumb really, but that’s what we did and we had a damn good time.
After we’d done this a few times over several months, I started having a more spiritual experience that I was very resistant to at first. My father had passed away a couple of years before in 1993 and I was at a place in my life where I was numb and don’t really remember a lot of what happened back then. My father was an important figure in my life and I was still grieving his loss and didn’t realize at the time how profound that loss really was and how it would affect my ability to step into manhood as I was still in my early 20’s.
On one of these adventures, I started feeling this way, more deeply and reverent than the rest of the group and so I peeled away from them and climbed up the side of one of those mountains surrounding the oasis. I was about halfway up on the top of this rock that was jutting out from the mountain and I stood up there and looked out over the amphitheater. In that moment, I tapped into strong warrior energy and began to yell, you know, like in a movie or something. It was primal, instinctual, spontaneous, and it was real. To be honest, it was difficult for me to yell that way. I was not used to expressing my truth and even in that moment, I felt the judgment of the world upon me.
Now, decades later, I can look back at that moment and understand that judgment was all within, self-judgment prevented me from expressing my truth and therefore prevented me from being heard. Yelling like a warrior at the top of that mountain while all the guys down below were laughing, I realized the power within me. I didn’t know how powerful that moment would be for me, but ultimately it was one small step and indication of the awakening that I would eventually experience in my life. While the rest of the crew was rolling around laughing like idiots, I was having a spiritually reverent moment and it was satisfying as fuck.
I sat on the rock and I looked out into the desert abyss. The full moon was shining bright and I could still see every start in the sky winking with approval. The moon was surrounded by concentric light rings that looked so ethereal…
In that moment there was no confusion whatsoever, just clarity of being. That was the first moment of true peace I’ve even felt and as I not just thought about my father in that moment, but merged with his essence and wisdom I felt God. I felt Divine protection for the first time in my life. It was a closing of the past relationship that I had with my father and an open into a new chapter of what he would mean to me, what he would teach me, and what impact he would have on me from the other side.
I experienced an immense amount of transmutation in that moment. From that time, I didn’t work with mushrooms again for decades. I was like, yeah, I came, I saw God, I met Divine Source. I know what that’s like and I’m good.
That said, I did have an adventure with them in Oaxaca, Mexico a couple of years later, see below.
Aside from that one-off in Oaxaca, I didn’t come back to psilocybin or plant medicine at all until after working through some extraordinary traumas throughout my 40’s. I waited until I had already processed a lot my pain, shame, and judgment. I had gotten really into yoga and meditation and was transmuting so much, but I knew that bigger experiences were possible and in fact necessary to recalibrate and integrate my nervous system to the more resilient levels that I had come to through the felt experience of my traumas. It wasn’t long before a friend introduced me to a plant medicine facilitator in Southern California who I sat with a few times. He was not a shaman and did not pretend to be, but he was a very skilled facilitator for sure. Set and setting, safety and security, the real deal.
When I went to sit with him the first time, he offered serveral types of medicine. He has ayahuasca tea, iboga, psilocybin, and the mainstay of his offering, “psilohuasca” (35% below side and 65% ayahuasca in a chocolate). He had a hard limit that he wouldn’t serve more than one dose to anyone until he knew they could handle it. I did that one dose as my first Aya experience and it was off the hook! I had no idea what it would be like, but it was strong af for me and it incited a profound awakening of energy and nervous system unwinding to the core. That’s what started my “adult” aged plant medicine journey. Read more about that on my ayahuasca page.
Oaxaca: Psilocybin Adventures
So my another powerful experience that I had with psilocybin was when I was traveling through Mexico in a 1972 Dodge Dart. This was mid nineties and I had left San Diego. I had intentionally intended originally to drive down in a 1968 Westphalia bus or VW bus, but I had it rehabbed and it kept having too many issues, so I left it with my girlfriend at the time to try to get my money back for it and all of my funds were tied up in the van, so I had a limited budget for a car. I spent $600 on the Dodge Dart and headed out with eight surfboards on top of my car, three surf buddies, and we drove down through Nogales into Mexico and just kept driving south and stopped at all the surf spots along the way. And then when we hit Acapulco, my buddies flew back and I kept going. And when I got to Puerto Escondido on my own, there were two guys there from California, and they were just about to head out and go to the next city and whatever, try to do whatever they were doing. And so we were already in Oaxaca at that time. And so they just rode with me. We just decided to have them ride with me. So we took off from Puerto Escondido up into the mountains of Oaxaca. And in Puerto Escondido, they had told us, Yeah, when you get to this little city, San Miguel or whatever, look it up. Ask for Tia maria. And I didn’t know anything about Maria Sabina at that time.
The Internet wasn’t a thing. I didn’t have the information or whatever. So we travel up and we got way up into the mountains. And I guess my car, the carburetor had some kind of an error issue or something like that. And so halfway up the mountain are probably more like, I guess, 80% way of the way up the mountain or three three quarters of the way up the mountain. It just died and it wouldn’t go. And I’m like, Well, fuck, we want to go have this experience. So I left the car. It just happened to die, like right pretty much in front of this little farmhouse on the side of the road. And I just said, Hey, I’m going to leave my car here. And I gave him some pesos and. And we started walking. Eventually, a bus picked us up and took us into the little town. And we started asking around for Tia maria. And and so I think it’s probably in retrospect, when you ask somebody for Tia maria, they take you to whichever Tia maria they’re going to get a kickback from. So there’s probably a lot of to Maria’s in that little village. But the one that we got taken to, we went into a little hut and we sat around. It was like these little like it was almost like a Disney movie or something with these little seats sitting around a fire in this little hut. And this old grandmother grandmotherly lady, you know, says Quantas Vice, you know, how many trips? And so we said five.
There were five of us. So she leaves for a little while and comes back with this banana leaf or some kind of like a leaf from a tree, like a big, you know, a big leaf. And it had a whole bunch of mushrooms in it. And she’s like presenting it to us. And so we pay her whatever she asks. I can’t remember. Maybe maybe it was $25, a couple of dollars or something like that. And at that time, I guess they had started to be probably based on Gordon Watson’s article a few years earlier. Do the research that people were coming in and doing that, you know, kind of psilocybin tourism down there and showing up. So the entrepreneurial people had had started like, you know, making these little hotels and and whatnot. And so it was on the side of a mountain, and we got hooked up at this hotel that was like a little chalet on the side of the mountain. It looked like a Swiss chalet. And so we split up and there were two of us in each in each room or each little chalet. And one of them one of us had three and the other one had two. And we ate the mushrooms and it was just like so cold up there in the mountains and at night. And we made this raging fire. And I remember me and my friend. What was his name? He just. What was his name? I’ll look him up. But he. He and I were in a in a chalet together, and we just laughed our asses off the whole night.
Oaxaca: Psilocybin Adventures
It was so beautiful up there. We walk outside and. And it was like you could see the up and down the mountain, the bands of wind, as they as they swish through the trees, around the mountains and on these layers, like strata of the trees and the mountain and whatnot. It was so beautiful and, and we had an amazing time. It was a very, a very beautiful experience, but it was not, again, set up setting, setting was there. But the set, the mind set wasn’t. I just I didn’t have the mind set tuned in. So that was an amazing experience though. And I ended up buying some more mushrooms and packing them in honey and taking them down to the Yucatan Peninsula where I ended up after after leaving Oaxaca.
Psilocybin Chocolates
