The incredible, edible mushroom.

Mushrooms didn’t fix my problems or save me, but they did help me remember who I really am. And that changes everything--bit by bit.

Jesus was my guru on my first journey. I didn't really expect him to show up, but there he was, standing in front of the holy mountain, which was glowing from within; a secret and sacred fire burned quietly in its belly. The mushrooms (or, more specifically, the crystallized psilocin that I had taken in a capsule about 45 mins prior) were starting to kick in, and the first figure I saw was a ballerina who was the epitome of grace and strength. She was the one who ushered me into the deep space I began to enter when it finally started hitting me; next thing I know, I'm on a white horse who is galloping in slow motion through the night air over sleeping cities toward the glowing peak. Jesus is standing before me at its base, and behind him is a long empty table set for seder but the disciples were missing. As my steed slowed to a halt it was just the three of us there; me, the horse, and the son of God I grew up praying to, right there in front of me after what felt like years of ghosting. Oh hey, Lord. Also, f*** you. Where the hell have you been? I’d been in a nihilistic fog for nearly a year at this point, not because I desired to be, but because my whole belief system had crumbled around me and I had found nothing viable in the ruins of it.

Jesus met my angry words with calm and compassionate eyes. He reached a closed palm out toward me, holding something up toward the strange, wild, pale night sky. He unfurled his brown fingers and spoke; his voice was calm, quiet, but sonorous and rich, and it vibrated through my whole body. "Eat, and you will understand." I was shocked; he spoke the words of the serpent in the garden. Suddenly I was Eve, and he was a snake, and the fruit of the tree was a mushroom. He waited. I gazed at him, never breaking eye contact, and I finally took the mushroom from his hand and I ate it. He smiled into my eyes and said 'see you on the other side.' What followed this was hours of torment as I lost touch with all category, linear thinking, time, and language. The mushroom took me out to the farthest reaches of space and divorced me from everything I knew and believed and understood.

After hours of this dying to all familiarity and feelings of safety, I found myself finally and irrevocably trapped inside a tiny green pod of Kryptonite at the edge of the universe. It was only big enough to house my curled up body; I lay in a fetal position on the studio floor in Nashville, TN, too; I was experiencing the void. Was this the void in Genesis, over which the spirit of God hovered to create life? Was this the moment of the Big Bang? All I knew was that there was no one, no thing, no familiar thought or idea or sensation, no ‘me’, no love, no joy, no pain, no stories. I felt I had been stripped completely bare of all identity. I could no longer reason, prove, understand, blame, posture, or know. This felt actually horrible. And in the void of all existence and all experience, my ego finally succumbed and I died--'I' died. There was no 'I' left to be experienced. Just as this death finally took place, just as I rounded the bend of the road to total annihilation and surrendered to it; I came immediately back to life again as I heard a mother's voice saying "Is this what you were afraid of?"

This melodious and soothing voice arrived in my consciousness like the wave of an ocean. It swept through me in a way that sound never could; it felt like THE voice. I experienced this voice like I experience breath; simply, bodily, purely, entirely. The voice recited this Psalm to me and I heard it with my whole body and my whole soul for the very first time, understanding these words in my cells--words I had heard hundreds, if not thousands of times during my life on earth.

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord. You hem me in--behind and before you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty to attain. Where can I go from your spirit? Where can i flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea; even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say "surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me", even the darkness will not be dark to you, the night will shine like the day for darkness if as light to you. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful. I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, O god! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you.

She stopped short of reading the section on hating God's enemies, and I suddenly understood that there were plenty of things in the Scriptures that weren't supernaturally wise, but rather a mirror held up to the complex natures of the humans who wrote them down; and I also understood that, miraculously, there were somehow plenty of things inside it that were Wisdom herself speaking. At that moment I knew that everything would be different after this. Not perfect, not 'fixed,' not opposite; but shifted, touched, a little more illuminated; and yes, after I heard Psalm 139 (or most of it, anyway) with my whole body, with my whole mind, with what felt like every molecule of my form and every cell in my being, everything did feel a little different.

I emerged from this journey wide eyed and full of wonder, dripping with gratitude and soaked in love.

After my second journey six months later, which contained much less ego death and into which I surrendered much more quickly and easily, I ate a peach after dinner. This is not newsworthy except that, due to food allergies which kept cropping up throughout my life, I had not been able to eat any stone fruit (plum, peach, cherry, nectarine) for over a decade. But there I was, bathed in the gentle light of golden hour, drinking Turkish white wine and eating a peach. I had attempted this simply because, as I came up from the depths, the mother's voice ‘said’ to me (not audibly, but I felt it in my body as I feel my intuition speaking) "You can eat peaches now." This little knowing also told me I didn't have to bite my nails anymore, so I didn't. I'd bitten them for my entire life since I was a toddler. Overnight, I stopped. I'd been told things like this could happen. I'd read all the literature that was intellectually accessible to me, Michael Pollan's "How To Change Your Mind,' and had listened to multiple summaries of the studies coming out of Johns Hopkins University. And yet, this all surprised and delighted me very much. I knew I’d potentially come out of the experience with some deeper trauma healing; I just had no idea that that meant I’d get peaches back.

It turns out allergies are not entirely separate from my feelings.

Mushrooms showed me just how deeply and intrinsically our "minds" ( by which I think we mean the 'I' that writes the stories about our experiences) are actually not our only intelligence. In fact, they are not even our most intelligent faculties. Our body, who is connected to the earth, who emerges from it and who returns to it at death, is intelligent beyond description. Our minds are not even truly separate from our bodies. We create those distinctions ourselves, and those distinctions create experiences of feeling disconnection. We have built entire cultural philosophies, medical systems, and even whole societies on the backs of these distinctions. (Descartes’ I think, therefore I am being one example.) But what I have learned in the last few years is that feeling, far from being “simply sensation”, is an act of knowing. Feeling is an act of knowing. Feeling is intelligence. The physical body carries our ancestry, both physically and spiritually. The physical body carries our experiences, and from the physical body emerges wisdom and understanding that predate its existence in this place in space-time. This elaborate and intricate microcosm of god (my body) had only been for so long disavowed and disowned by my monkey mind that they decided to finally get my attention with some panic attacks and severe anxiety in 2016. (Thank you body.) Because of these panic attacks and anxiety I sought help for the first time with the deep and healing process of untangling childhood trauma from reality in the now. Trauma therapy began to save my life; mushrooms helped me to continue the work of healing.

Mushrooms remind me at my depths that who I am is unified, one, and whole. All the dysfunction and dis-ease and disorder and despair that I experience is just that—experience. I am not those things and I have never been; I am woven into God without divide or disconnection; I, the witness of my experience, the ‘me’ that experiences life through this body, am not separate from God. That knowing, which I felt so deeply in the journey I describe above, is what keeps me showing up every day to my own shortcomings with compassion and self-honesty and the willingness to change.

Mushrooms aren’t a cure-all or a silver bullet. In fact, in some ways I’ve had more difficult days since I started eating them from time to time than I had ever before in my life—because I am choosing not to run from my shadows or my deepest fears anymore. However, the resiliency I feel has increased such that I do not find myself wilting or burying my head in the sand anymore. I am no longer a slave to fear.

I don’t know how or why mushrooms evolved into the creatures they are, with the capabilities they have for helping us expand our understanding and open our minds, but I’ll be forever grateful somebody told me about them and that I felt brave enough to try. Therapy is still a part of my life, and so is doing the hard and daily work of showing up to myself and life and the people I love in the little things. Mushrooms didn’t fix my problems or even shorten the path to healing; but they did help me remember who I really am. And that changes everything—bit by bit.