A BRAND NEW GROOVE

My Week With The Mushroom Goddess

At some point, most of us have played (or been coerced into playing) the game of “Trust Me,” where you allow yourself to freefall backwards into the waiting arms of a partner we are asked to trust to catch us. It was very big in 70s New Age groups, from where it migrated to suburban parties, at the latter of which you may have found yourself on your ass, vowing never to trust again. I sometimes regretted trusting, but I never lost my willingness to trust (a propensity that hasn’t, in all cases, served me so well, but beats the alternative). And so it was that, on the written advice of one Alexander Beiner, a co-founder of the Rebel Wisdom group, author of The Bigger Picture, and veteran psychonaut, I allowed myself to enroll in the Summer 2023 Regenerative Stewarship Psilocybin Retreat, hosted and and superbly stage-managed in the Netherlands by Awaken The Medicine Within. ATMW has a terrific staff, but the unquestioned Blue Fairy is Natasja Pelgrom, a latter-day curandera and probably as close as I’ll come to acting the part of Carlos Castaneda meeting Yaqui shaman Don Juan. Natasja was born of Dutch and Portugese parents, but the Latin quotient is strong: dark eyes, Athenian nose, and lustrous hair the color of chestnut. Her partner/facilitator for this retreat was that same Alexander Beiner, a brilliant guy who served as the yang balance to Natasja’s yin, and is also a bit of a trickster.

In my first appearance before the altar, upstairs in the ceremonial room of the meeting place known simply as the “Slot,” I lit a candle and explained why it was I’d decided to play “Trust Me” with Natasja and Allie: “I’m here because Allie’s intellect earned the trust of my mind, and Natajsa’s tenderness earned the trust of my heart.” Until this day, I had met them only in the virtual sense. ATMW does scrupulous prep work with its psychedelic pilgrims, and though they’re very clear about not being able to offer therapy or medical help in the clinical sense, their vetting struck me as very thorough, right down to strict dietary and pharmaceutical regimens and even a kind of Lenten abstention from coffee, booze, and sex (I took the last of these proscriptions to mean that I would need all my mojo for the ceremonies). Natasja’s sense of “set and setting,” the standbys of psychedelic practice since Timothy Leary—and well into the past—was distincly non-clinical. It was ceremonial, informed by her experience in working with medicine women and shamans in places like Costa Rica and other locations in Central and South America, and with a generous tip of the hat to Native American tradition. Our sleeping quarters were glamping tents with full mattresses, and our ceremonial grounds were in an enormous teepee big enough to accomodate all twelve acolytes plus the four principal facilitators, with a generous altar mid-circle where a fire pit might have been. We took our meals, prepared by our own private chef, together. The chef’s artistry nearly made up for the total absence of salt. Two days in and I had become somewhat adept at substituting cumin and paprika for sodium, though not without once being caught red-handed stealing a pinch of salt from our tribal leaders’ table.

My fellow travelers had converged on Schiphol Airport from parts known and unknown, but mostly from America, the  U.K., and the EU. We had a Norwegian viking, a Sri Lankan adept of Buddhist practice, a young Romanian woman who could have been a top model, a burly gay Australian guy we all came to love over the five days, two therapists, a Brit who’d done impressive work for global health initiatives, and others with equally compelling stories. We’d all come to the retreat with wounds that needed binding, or baggage to unpack, though not all of us were equally able to acknowledge these at first. We spent a lot of time in sharing circles, lighting incense and chanting Ah-HO! after each of us gave his or her psychic weather report, so there were inevitably moments when it felt like a 12-Step meeting, a drum circle at Esalen, or a very upscale women’s yoga class (with Enya crooning in the background). There were times, particularly during the initiatory phase, when I felt I could have done with fewer of the New Age trappings and the trauma-informed therapeutic argot (I learned that in these circles, one never says, “I want you to,” only “I invite you to.”) I even bridled a bit at the characterization of our ceremonial unit as a “container,” since I didn’t especially want to be contained. These quibbles turned out to be my own vanities. One is quickly disabused of snark and pre-judgement in the presence of people who put so much love into what they do. Natasja and her crew were recreating something timeless for us, drawing us gently into a stream of human experience that had been flowing for millennia. The shaman’s drum, the rattles, the incense, the Mapacho (nicotiana rustica) from Natasja’s pipe, blown softly over our heads in preparation for ceremony, the body and breath work led by her graceful-as-a-doe assistant Amanda, and the gentle counsel that only a truly big man can offer from Henk —all of these were sacrament, and all had their place. The twelve of us received equal measures of tenderness, much of it in smiles. Nobody had smiled at me that way since the day my mother died. The right kind of smile can bring tears of gratitude.

Before making this inward odyssey, I’d never considered that commodifying plant medicines that had been in sacramental use by indigenous peoples since antiquity and marketing them to wealthy psychonauts—not to say the ever-avaricious pharmaceutical industry—might be thought of as a form of cultural appropriation. I might even—in my snarkiest mien—have dismissed such a notion as yet another example of virtue signaling by upper middle class white people who’d overdosed on Post-Colonial Studies curricula. But after participating in the retreat and reading Beiner’s book, I have come to think that such a caveat is a necessary prophylactic against the careless importation of a sacred tradition into Brooklyn brownstones and upscale spas. It’s a little like the prohibition given to celebrants of the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries against speaking publicly about the things they’d experienced, or trying to replicate them in their villas—a prohibition that held for two-thousand years. The wisdom acquired in such a ceremony is to be held mostly in silence. Keeping a guardian at the ceremonial gate is a way of honoring the tradition and the ancestors who authored it. Indeed, it is a form of true stewardship, which is, after all, what this retreat was all about. Nonetheless, I feel like people should know of this resource, because it can probably effect more healing than a truckload of SSRI’s.

All this is part of how and why my anxious superego agreed to step aside and allow me to play “Trust Me” with my teachers. By the time the first dose of psilocybin truffles was administered, I’d already fallen back into their arms, never in doubt that they’d catch me. But there was another factor, maybe the biggest one, at play. In the (not so) halcyon days of my youth, when I’d first sampled the forbidden fruit of entheogens like LSD-25, mescaline, and psilocybin, scored on the street and without much concern for set and setting, much less sacrament, I had glimpsed a different world. A world that was more real, not in the sense of “buck up and face reality, buddy” but in the transcendental sense of “this is the way the world is without blinkers.” I saw the world that perhaps quantum physicists hint at with their labored equations, and that Indian rishis had written of in the Vedas. Luminous, numinous, vibrant, pervaded by spirit. Ceaselessly changing and yet changeless. Paradoxical. Trees were no longer just trees, but fountains of radiant energy. Music was the breath of God, and sex, well…sex was sacrament. It was William Blake’s world. I began in my twenties to seek out writings that would reinforce this vision—give it some philosophical framing—from the Neo-Platonists, Gnostics and Sufis to Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy and Colin Wilson’s For Those Who Would Walk With The Gods and Patrick Harpur’s Daemonic Reality. Armed with this thought and with the lingering memory of those early psychonautic journies, I went out into the world of “getting and spending,” wins and losses, gain and forfeit with a kind of psychic shield. All through my thirties and forties, I felt—to paraphrase Norman Mailer—as if I were under the aegis of a goddess. But time takes its toll. I rose and fell countless times, got hired and fired, reached lofty heights of professional success in Hollywood only to find myself, not long after, wiping down blackboards for $10 an hour and shoplifting diapers from the supermarket, lost one wife and came close to losing a second, and saw my effort in authoring four novels come almost to nought. The numinous glow began to fade, the colors of the world receded into monochrome, and worst of all, I became brittle, crusty, and often self-pitying. I did not like this world, and I didn’t much like this person either. And then, on top of everything else, there was the specter of death, lording over the crossroad ahead, saying “I’m waiting for you, pal.”

No way was I going to go into my “grandpa years” with this caul across my face. I wanted that other world back. I wanted to see my wife as the goddess she was, to treasure my friends, and to love my children without reserve. And when I died, I wanted to do so with purpose, knowing that I hadn’t squandered my shot at redemption. Can all this be had for the price of a retreat? Of course not. But if the retreat happens to be with the right sort of people, it can show you the way.

During the two roughly three-hour truffle ceremonies in the teepee, I wanted for nothing else. The plant medicine in my veins, the beat of the shaman’s drum, the gentle touches on shoulder and scalp, the floral scents—all of these invited me to recapture at least a piece of the world I’d once known to be real. The experience was soft, sweet, sometimes erotic, and surpassingly feminine. The “visuals” came mostly in pastels, which worked with the floral motif (sight, scent and spray) and feminine energy of the ceremony. They weren’t the hi-res, hyperreal hallucinations that often come with LSD and DMT, and can create a Metaverse in your head. But they were very nice. Kaleidoscope patterns, geometric mandalas, and Mayan art with eyes closed; everything in a soft, glowing slo-mo with eyes open, which is how I spent most of my trips, if only to watch the women become more and more beautiful! And the sky! Big, puffy cumulus clouds churning, merging, pulsing against a cerulean blue, seeming almost organic. Ah, there it was. The world I’d nearly lost.

Truffles are the “sclerotia” of the magic mushroom—part of the mycelia found underground. They were used here to brew a tea with ginger and lemon, and when eaten, they have something of the taste, texture and look of walnuts. Eating them was optional, but I ate them all. It won’t be the last time. It was only a beginning, a kind of reconnaissance of the territory ahead, but it was a true eucharist. The flesh and blood were those of the goddess who had once been my guide and consort, in a wilderness of mirrors reflecting a day-to-day world that, for the most part, isn’t the real one at all.