What a Long Strange Trip it Was: A report from my most recent mushroom journey
Buckle up, folks. This here blog post has doozy sharpied all over it. In the next handful of paragraphs, I’m going to attempt to describe—in context with preparation and integration—my most recent psilocybin journey where my identity washed away and I experienced a kind of spiritual reboot, among many other fantastic and mysterious things. But before we get too carried away, let’s trot out the fine print and the disclaimers, shall we?
I know all too well that telling folks about a mushroom trip can be an excruciating process for the listener. It’s akin to getting a play-by-play of a dream from your co-worker at the water cooler or listening to a kindergartener explain his rationale for the indiscriminate swarm of burgundies in his latest landscape painting. Both the drawing and the dream are magical events—it’s just that sometimes there ain’t enough pixie dust to go around.
Secondly, please remember that psychedelic journeys are based on context and visceral perceptions. While certain messages resonate like inside jokes, other key moments arrive with a profound spiritual thud. Non-Arlos may either be struck dumb by banal discoveries randomly vaulted to the sublime or worse, they might trip over childish details as they wander through the rubble of my deeply personal journey.
So bear with me as I disclose too much, dwell on trivial moments and get this retrospective all wrong, for my aim is a noble one. I want to demystify this therapy and illustrate a process that remains shrouded in misconception and ambiguity.
This is what it’s like to receive legal psilocybin therapy in the state of Oregon.
An Autobiographical Tangent
After chatting about everything from trauma, current relationships and past psychedelic experiences with my facilitator, I settled on about 4 solid intentions that I wanted to explore during this journey; one idea, however, clearly hovered above the rest—I wanted to learn how to embrace death and navigate a landscape of grief.
2024 was a difficult year. The world lost a human who I loved quite deeply—she left us suddenly while dicing onions for brunch. Her passing was all the things—painful, manic, celebratory, dreadful and cathartic—and I spent most of the year bouncing around between gratitude, introspection and despair. This grief sorta squatted on my standard depression and though I was working through it somewhat gracefully, I knew I needed a mushroom journey to give me some perspective.
My other intentions were extensions of stuff I’ve been grappling with for most of my life. While mushrooms have helped me elevate beyond a crippling anxiety, I am still dogged by occasional bouts of panic—coupled with a predisposition towards depression, it’s a difficult path that I tend to tread. My last trip (about 15 months ago) gave me indelible insight about the origins of my anxiety, and I hoped to dig into that concept once again. As strange as it sounds, I also wanted to learn how to heal—I tend to help others without pausing to help myself.
Finally, I snuck one more modest intention under the radar; I wanted to inhabit the role of my clients (once again) so I could have a visceral reminder of what it’s like for the folks I’ve been shepherding through the cosmos.
Preparation for the Mushroom Journey
As the date of my experience approached, I desperately tried not to attach big expectations to the experience as I know that grandiose predictions are dangerous in this realm. I tell my clients the same I thing I had to tell myself—though mushrooms are very very likely to transform us, it’s imperative we embrace whatever magnitude the medicine delivers. We never get to steer the ship and demanding a certain level of psychedelic journey is a one-way ticket to ickytown.
I also prepared in the same way I ask my clients to. I leaned into ritual for 10 days before the journey. I meditated daily, journaled every other day, and on the advice of my brilliant facilitator, I built an altar of knickknacks that I judged to be symbolic of my journey and my intentions. Every day I added a new element and changed out the water in the bowl.
The Things on My Altar
A photo of the departed. A container of soil made from her body. A list of initials of everybody I’ve had the honor of trip sitting for. A rooster necklace that tends to symbolize a lot of what I like about myself. A sign I made that said, “Trip Like a Champion Today” (More on this later). Various photographs of humans I love—my wife, my parents, my family, my friends. A book of poems by Campbell McGrath.
While curating the room on the morning of my journey, we recreated the altar at the end of the bed, which naturally proved to be a gorgeous little refuge during the more turbulent phases of my trip.
The Journey Begins: The Nitty Gritty of the Session
After two preparation meetings with my facilitator, coupled with almost a year of introspection (I had multiple opportunities to trip in the fall, but I wasn’t quite emotionally ready), I arrived at the center at 945 AM for my psilocybin therapy administration session—I chose Vital Reset in Hood River; it’s a place where I facilitate often, and the humans who run the place are phenomenal.
We were swiftly greeted by the service center representative who quickly gave us a tour of the facility. ( I’d been there a zillion times before, and I’ve facilitated journeys in all of their rooms; still it was nice to be reminded of the layout from the prospective of a client). As fate would have it, no other journeys were scheduled, so I had the whole center to myself. I slowly unpacked my bag, built my altar in the room and nervously tinkered with the sound bowls in the main area. Though I had forms to fill out and mushrooms to pay for, the emphasis was on my comfort—I didn’t feel any pressure to accelerate the experience and the paperwork was introduced organically.
I elected to take a 25mg dose of homogenized B+ psilocybin mushrooms with a 10mg booster in reserve in case I needed a little nudge (Spoiler Alert: I did not). The milligram unit is total psilocybin analyte, but for those of you who are used to finding shrooms in plastic baggies in your sock drawer, this dose was about 5 grams. The service representative showed me the homogenized mushroom mix and gave me an option of how to ingest. I decided on simple hot water mixed with mushrooms. As the tea was brewing, my facilitator and I took a moment to center ourselves in the journey room. We enacted an opening ceremony, during which we sorta summoned the universe and invited the humans who we hold closest to our hearts to join us on my jaunt through the cosmos. Once the dose was ready, the service representative slipped into the room and presented my mushroom tea on a wooden tray.
The moment of truth had arrived. I struck up a meditation pose on the bed, and took six deep breaths. I looked around at my facilitator and the service representative—their heads bowed in dignified repose—and I felt both felt safe and seen. Their glow notwithstanding, I was very nervous. I knew this experience wold shade toward the monumental, and like any time traveler, I was slightly concerned about the conditions on the ground in that other dimension.
My brain started chasing its own tail. For a millisecond, I thought about getting up and leaving. Then, of course, I remembered why I was there in the first place. It’s because I trusted the medicine. I wasn’t there to suffer. I was there to heal, just like several of my clients had done in the very same room. I took a deep breath, looked up to the shrine and drank the tea in two big gulps. It was like drinking cornhusks and dirt—how could it taste like anything else?
No More Breath and Ego Death
As I wanted to welcome the medicine into my body while focusing on my breath, I remained upright in a practiced meditation pose. Within about 20 minutes, I started to feel the medicine buzz through my body. I’ve felt the feeling countless times before, and I greeted it as a beautiful confirmation that the mushrooms had arrived and would begin the work of tuning my body and soul.
Soon enough, the visions surfaced—the first, a diorama of generic 60s space-age imagery of the American southwest. I saw diners adorned with giant teal oval signs and peeked into living rooms equipped with robot maids and futuristic appliances. That said, it was all very Jetsons-like, a version of the future dreamed up 60 years ago.
This was just preamble, for the landscape shuttered almost as soon as it surfaced, and my own intentions came into focus. I immediately saw a calendar—in rapid-fire mini-epiphanies, the mushrooms addressed all my minor intentions and after every verdict, the page flipped to another matter. Your anxiety? It’s just a label you’ve given your fear. You don’t need to carry it with you. Your health? You’re perfectly healthy. What’s not healthy is the stubborn vigilance you keep over your body. Your friend who told you last night that she has cancer? She’s going to be fine.
These declarations came swiftly, and I wasn’t really given the opportunity to ask follow-up questions or glean more insight. It was almost like these mini-lessons were previews to the main attraction that was soon to begin—sure anxiety is crippling, but let’s look at the damn thing in the context with the question that you really want answered: what do I do with death, and how do I grieve?
And this is when it started to get real. I emerged inside a white geometric cathedral splattered with color, almost like MC Esher and Jackson Pollack got drunk inside the Vatican. Suddenly, I was ambushed by floating fingers, and I felt the a palpable pain of accusation (there’s more here about my childhood, but I’m working off a word count)—the ache swiftly turned to insight—how others see me doesn’t matter, for my identity is so much vaster than my fragile ego. A quick note here—all mushroom trips are different. Sometimes we get visuals without insight or vice versa. In this particular trip, I was being fed analysis in real-time.
Then, guess who showed up—that lovely human who died last April—and we immediately started roadtripping the astral plane. We were in Paris in the 20s—drinking martinis and smoking long cigarettes with a group of raucous artists. I never had the chance to ask her all the things I wanted to ask like, did you know you were going to die so young/ do you have any unfinished business to take of etc etc? Instead, we just sorta partied as the narrative jumped from Paris to Egypt to further parts unknown. Her countenance was one of love and immortality. It felt so good to hang out again. Was this a missed opportunity to interact with the dead or might this holy interaction be exactly what I needed? Stay tuned, reader, stay tuned.
Just like that, my person disappeared, leaving me alone to perform my own vanishing act. I watched my legs disappear, then my arms, and soon I was left with just my heart and my head. Though I was pretty far gone, I was ironically aware of the impending ego death—of course, that fact alone is enough to prove that I wasn’t quite relegated to another consciousness. As I focused on my breath, intent to drift away to wherever the mushrooms warranted, I had a wild, transformative, life-changing and contradictory realization. I finally understood that I didn’t have to breathe to stay alive ( more on this later, of course). And just like that, I drifted away like Dobie Gray…
The Dazzling Minutia
The play-by-play has to stop somewhere, so I’m going to summarize the rest. For the rest of the session, I was treated to a whole slew of visuals and insight. Around a giant nest at the top of a fir tree, I assembled—alongside my ancestors and community—for a nightly task—the strong impression being that this mission was an eternal one. Sometime before or after that, I was invited to join a circle of teachers and healers from all different cultures and we sat around a campfire in silence. I visited sleazy yet sacred casinos, decked out with velvet staircases and stewarded by gigantic pumas with cigars before the drugs began to eventually wear off. Slowly but surely, I became aware of my facilitator again and the gentle whir of noise coming from outside the room; even the concept of the interstate back to Portland boomeranged back to my mind.
Keep in mind, that I left a whole lot of stuff out. While I welcomed the initial arrival of the medicine, it was intense enough that I asked to hold my facilitator’s hand. And even though the mushrooms took away my motor skill and I felt a sacred responsibility to stay tethered to the bed, I did get up and struggle through a bathroom break or three. My facilitator was actively holding space the entire time—scoring the soundtrack to my experience, using scents to move energy and instinctually embellishing—with feathers, stones and learned intuition—the tender and sacred atmosphere of the room. I barely uttered a word during the first 3.5 hours of my experience, and I began to get chatty as I transitioned back to my ordinary state of conciousness.
For those of you keeping score, I arrived at the center at 945 AM, ingested the mushrooms at 1030 AM and departed the center at 5PM. People who journey are never allowed to leave on their own, so I had a transportation plan figured out for the trip back to Portland.
The Hard Art of Integration
Sometimes, integration is straightfoward—during their respective journey, one could earn peremptory liberation from a person or affliction and their post-trip marching orders are to revel in the catharsis and to take bold steps into a brave new world. Other times, it’s more obscure—what do fat cats in ethereal casinos mean in context with ancestors in eagle’s nests and an altar full of sacred intentions? Mine was/is a little bit of both. Keep in mind, this only happened 10 days ago, and I will be integrating this experience for months. But since I want to shine a light on what integration looks like, I’ll show you what I’ve got so far.
If you remember, I stumbled upon that contradictory epiphany about not needing to breathe to stay alive. That, for me, was the hero moment which allowed my self to dissolve. Not only did it teach me a valuable lesson about vigilance, but it allowed me to shut down and endure a kind of spiritual reboot.
Breathing for me is a form of radical, self-care. Not only does it help me combat anxiety and the unknown in real-time, but as a part of my wellness routine, it generates a powerful dose of calm and gratitude within.
But it also leans on a foundation of anarchy. It assumes dysfunction, almost to say that I cannot possibly embrace the unknown by myself and I can’t trust my instinct and experience to walk the dark corridors of adulthood alone. If I heed an earlier lesson from the trip that my anxiety—while rooted in childhood and a very real thing—is a label I don’t need to carry with me all the time, then perhaps I can dispense with my fierce dedication to self-preservation and take a break from the vigilance once in a while.
Does this mean I’ll stop meditating and cease seeking out new avenues to self-improvement? Heck no. Meditation helps me banish racing thoughts and reminds me to slow down and appreciate the universe. It just means that I can trust my instincts to navigate new situations and not overthink every detail beforehand. It means—to take a lesson from my dearly departed—I could stand to be more spontaneous and revel in the joy of being alive. What does this look like in my real life? If I have to skip a meditation session to eat donuts with a friend, I shouldn’t feel ashamed about it. There’s wellness and there’s scarcity, and in the face of unthinkable tragedy, I may have tipped the scales in favor of the latter.
And that’s just the tip of the psychedelic iceberg. My spiritual reset has me feeling refreshed, and I feel like I’ve more room in my brain if that makes sense. As I mentioned before, I exude big denmother energy, and I can’t remember a moment in my waking life when I wasn’t slightly worried about the state of the humans and the world around me. During integration, my facilitator reminded me that I repeatedly muttered, “I needed the rest. It feels so good to rest,” and that seems to me intimately related to the few hours I had without my ego rubbernecking reality. I’m still connecting the dots to my experience in the nest and what it means in context with life and death and a handful of other things I was shown while under the hood of the universe.
Am I forever healed? Nope. Will I never again feel the pangs of anxiety flutter through my body on a supposedly gorgeous summer afternoon? No f*cking way. Did I emerge from the experience with new ways to consider my afflictions? Yes yes yes! Was I granted a path through the black forests of grief? So much yes.
Thoughts on Our Legal Psilocybin Therapy Model
Some folks who use mushrooms “underground” are quick to criticize Oregon’s legal therapy model. These folks tend to gawk at absurd price tags—they do exist, but they exist in every industry—and know little about the rigorous preparation and integration that the therapy mandates. They’ll also lament some of the OHA’s more stringent regulations—for example, we don’t allow our clients to go outside and connect with nature. Futhermore, they might even see this therapy model as a misappropriation of indigenous culture and feel like the mushrooms are being severed from their original purpose and crammed into the western medical model. These are all apt objections. (I’ve spent a blog post on this topic a few months ago), but let’s return to one of my minor intentions for a minute.
If you remember, I wanted to explore what it felt like to be a client in this space—from the rigorous prep sessions and integration brainstorms to tripping indoors in the middle of the day on lab-tested legal mushrooms. Here’s what I can say. I had the most powerful mushroom trip of my life and it was because of the container I built with my facilitator—she had earned my absolute trust and I leaned on her wisdom and held her hand through the more turbulent phases of my journey. I had the most powerful mushroom trip of my life because I was greeted and treated with kindness from the service representative, and I tripped in a comfortable room beautifully curated for introspection. In short, I knew I was safe. I did not have to worry about noises in the woods, strangers at a nocturnal dance party nor did I have to talk to my neighbors or be ambushed by my day-to-day reality while tripping in my house.
Would it have been nice to hug a tree or to have laid in the grass and surveyed the clouds? Heck yeah, it would have been. Yet, my journey was an inward one—an excursion so exotic and profound that any little hiccough from the real world could have made it go haywire. And that’s what this therapy is designed to do. We look at ourselves honestly. We admit our own fragilities, and we open ourselves up to transformation. The Oregon model facilitates this process, and for that, I’m forever grateful.