![](\"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/weed-plus-the-healing-mystique-of-magic-mushrooms.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\nUnlike acid (which I still hadn\u2019t tried at that point), mushrooms felt like the next level up from cannabis \u2014 that is, \u201cweed plus\u201d in the words of my sister. The psychedelic experience, or \u201ctrip,\u201d would be longer than a regular weed high, but shorter than 12 hours of LSD. After that first time tripping, I soon learned that, for me, mushrooms and cannabis bring on similar visuals of swirling floral patterns and paisleys in a pink Technicolor palette.<\/p>\n
My first time taking mushrooms was easily one of the best, most significant days of my life: playful, exploratory, spiritual. I felt like I was reborn, discovering the world and its wonders for the first time. The shrooms had turned down the volume on the anxiety that defined my day-to-day and turned up the volume on my appreciation for life. For the first time, the phrase \u201cbe here now\u201d meant something to me on an embodied level \u2014 but like Ram Dass, who ventured to India after coming up and down on countless psychedelic trips during his tenure as a psychiatry professor at Harvard in the 1960s, I too wondered why it seemed I needed mushrooms to feel the way I did. I asked myself, \u201cWould I be able to get there on my own one day?\u201d<\/p>\n
Psych 101<\/h4>\n
It\u2019s a common adage that one can accomplish the same degree of healing in a single psychedelic trip that might otherwise require years of therapy. By the same token, in the psychedelic community it\u2019s often said that \u201cthe journey is the medicine.\u201d In other words, such as in the case of mushrooms, it\u2019s not just the psilocybin, the main psychoactive compound, that spurs a neurological reset \u2014 it\u2019s the experience of the trip itself. This can come with insights, challenges and joys that consequently foster lessons and memories that nourish the soul and last a lifetime. Science can only attempt to describe this alternative headspace.<\/p>\n
Many well-known research institutions such as Johns Hopkins and UCLA are exploring how psilocybin is being used for mental health treatments and can occasion a \u201cmystical experience,\u201d defined by \u201cscale scores\u201d of seven criteria. What scientists are finding is that the degree to which a patient undergoes a mystical experience often correlates to the degree of healing they experience for whatever condition they are treating, be it anxiety, depression, or something else.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you optimally screen, facilitate and integrate these [psychedelic] experiences, you can almost reliably facilitate a mystical level kind of encounter, which may be predictive of positive therapeutic outcomes,\u201d said Dr. Charles Grob<\/a>, psychedelic researcher and UCLA professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.<\/p>\n To put it bluntly, the promise of psychedelic therapy is forcing researchers to grapple with notions of God or mysticism that have otherwise been absent from Western science and medicine. Indigenous cultures, on the other hand, are well-known for structured spiritual-medicinal approaches and traditions that incorporate psychedelic<\/a> plant medicine, such as ayahuasca, magic mushrooms or peyote.<\/p>\n Grob notes that clinicians have much to learn from indigenous practices, which \u201cwere entirely dependent on a harmonious relationship with the world of nature for shelter, for food, for continuity, and for societal groups.\u201d<\/p>\n He goes on to say that the psychedelic experience may be symbolic of a death and rebirth ritual. That could be thanks to the experience of \u201cego death\u201d \u2014 a psychedelic-induced dampening of the brain\u2019s default mode network (DMN), where the ego resides. Ego death, or \u201cego dissolution,\u201d can act as a reset for the DMN, helping to rewire thought patterns that were otherwise constrained by the ego, and facilitating an increase in personality traits like openness or empathy.<\/p>\n In breaking out of old thought patterns, a person who experiences ego death may also obtain a degree of healing from habits that previously kept them in a loop, particularly in addiction. Turning down the volume on the ego can also help engender a sense of oneness with the surrounding world, people or nature.<\/p>\n \u201cThe ego is looking after us,\u201d Grob says. \u201cThere\u2019s good reason to be compassionate toward the ego: It\u2019s trying to do its best, but it\u2019s not useful, and it overshoots in what it does and disconnects us. What psychedelics do is turn down the defenses.\u201d<\/p>\n The ego\u2019s defenses can manifest in addictions, such as eating disorders, compulsions and obsessions. \u201cThey\u2019re all a maladaptive defense response to adversity,\u201d says Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, Head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London<\/a>.<\/p>\n Through psychedelic therapy, Grob says, we can engineer a context in which it\u2019s safe to let the ego go off duty and allow us to be vulnerable in a caring, nurturing environment. \u201cIt\u2019s about going backwards to go forward,\u201d he said. \u201cBeing vulnerable to be stronger, more flexible, more capacious.\u201d<\/p>\n Finding the right setting for a psychedelic experience is up to the beholder; it could be in a therapist\u2019s office, a spiritual ceremony, with friends at a music concert, or decidedly alone in the woods. Once that ideal setting is found, one can relax and focus his or her mindset on whatever kind of healing or intention they set out to explore with the help of psychedelic medicine.<\/p>\n Even back in the \u201960s, Grob says, pioneer researchers \u201cfound that those who had a mystical level experience had improved quality of life.\u201d <\/p>\n With psilocybin in particular, he said, \u201cthe replicability and degree to which the trip might happen, and the depth is more apparent\u201d\u2014 than perhaps with other psychedelics such as LSD \u2014 because the six to eight-hour trip is \u201ceasier to control\u201d than something that could otherwise be twice as long.<\/p>\n Despite the growing amount of research, psychedelic scientists have yet to fully comprehend how substances such as psilocybin work in the brain. Psilocybin definitely stimulates the serotonin 2A receptor in the brain and can occasion ego death by dampening the default mode network. Even so, the compound remains a mystery.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/weed-plus-the-healing-mystique-of-magic-mushrooms-1.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\nSafe Travels<\/strong><\/h4>\n
![](\"https:\/\/thcinct.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/weed-plus-the-healing-mystique-of-magic-mushrooms-2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n