DOSE: T+ 0:00	8 g	oral	Mushrooms - P. cubensis	(tea)
T+ 12:00	1 tablet	oral	Pharms - Sertraline
T+ 12:00	2 tablets	oral	Melatonin
T+ 12:00	1 tablet	oral	Pharmaceuticals

BODY WEIGHT:

180 lb

Front Notes and Background:

I did not seek to take mushrooms for the experience of a “high” but for understanding and healing. This was my second trip using mushrooms, though I am a regular cannabis user (usually once per week at a dose of 6mg THC in gummy form). I abstained from cannabis for the two weeks prior to my mushroom journey. I have also had prior experiences with other drugs, including LSD, 25-I, opiates, and MDMA, but these experiences were recreational and not intended as a spiritual experience.

My first mushroom journey was about two years ago just before I lost my father to Covid-19. My mother had passed away several years prior to my father. With this journey, I hoped to speak to both of my parents and heal from previous traumas. I did not want to go into the experience lightly but with great respect and humility. Before ingesting the mushrooms, I researched until I found the components of a Mazatec ritual.

Research and Preparation:

I secured and portioned out for myself 8 grams of psilocybin cubensis, Hillbilly Magic strain, using a kitchen scale. I chose this strain for two reasons. First, it was available. Second, it was described as potentiating introspective and spiritual experiences.
I chose a day when I would not have to work or have any other responsibilities, which meant that I waited two weeks after purchasing the mushrooms to use them. To ensure I lost as little psilocybin as possible to oxidization, I placed the mushrooms in a Ziploc bag and used a straw to suck the excess air out. Then, I left the bag in my dark pantry until the ritual.

While awaiting the day that I would journey, I researched the likely effects of mushrooms, their possible risks, which I ultimately judged to be low, and what I could expect. The ritual I discovered said that I should bring in fresh flowers, light white candles and copal incense, include a picture of St. Martin de Caballero, who is said to represent Chikon-Tokoxo, the Lord of the Mountain, on my altar, and “smudge” the room with palo santo to purify it. I did not have all the components for purification in the ritual (such as lime and green tobacco), so I improvised certain aspects. (I already practice a form of syncretic Catholicism, so I feel that this syncretic ritual worked well for me. It may not work well for others.)

Additionally, I created a playlist that included chants from Maria Sabina and other songs that I thought would get me into the place I wanted to find. Three days prior to the ritual, I stopped taking my SSRI medications* and abstained from sexual experiences. Around 15 hours before the ritual, I stopped eating and drank only water. The night before the ritual, I went to bed early and slept through the night.

On the morning of the ritual, I showered and dressed in comfortable clothing. Then, I prepared the room I would journey in by setting up an altar on a small side-table and pushing an ottoman against the sofa to make a large, comfortable space on which to lie. I also prepared a bottle of rose infused water that I blessed and prayed over. Then, I wrote out a prayer to the mushrooms calling them by the many names the Mazatec people use such as “Small Ones who Spring Forth from the Earth” and “Little Saint Teachers.” I asked them to teach me, stated my humility and openness, and offered myself up to their care and wisdom.

Ingestion/Ceremony:

Before ingestion, I remeasured my mushrooms to be entirely sure that I had the correct dosage and placed them in a cup. I poured enough lemon juice in the cup to soak the mushrooms. Then, I ate them in several spoonfuls, chewing each thoroughly. I drank sips of orange juice to swallow them since they seemed to trigger my gag reflex. I think that was partially because of the lemon juice. The mushrooms themselves were earthy and not at all unpleasant. I had swallowed all the mushrooms by 10:14 am.

Journey Effects:

After I ingested the mushrooms, I lay down on the couch. I had two trip sitters who covered me with a weighted blanket and several other blankets. While I waited to digest the mushrooms, they lit the candles, prayed over me, and smudged the room. They also played a ten-hour video of rain in a forest on the television while I listened to my prepared playlist on my headphones.

Within ten or twenty minutes, I had the sensation of being pulled toward Oneness/God/Heaven. When I closed my eyes, my world dissolved into beautiful dancing fractals, and I entered a state that felt like “dream walking.” I could still make enough contact with reality to ask for my trip sitters to make the room as dark as possible, and I covered my face with a blanket, believing I was traveling through the veil to the place of the dead. After covering my head, I felt as if I had crossed the veil that separates us from God/Heaven/Oneness/The Dead and was, in fact, one with God. My ability to speak, think in sentences, or think of myself as “self” dissolved. There was only the feeling of ecstatic, blissful oneness with the Source, which overwhelmed my emotions to the point where I was crying and laughing while simultaneously feeling intense waves of pleasure throughout my body.

I deeply felt my grief emotions for my parents while at the same time feeling a pervasive and overwhelming sense of peace and gratitude. I was grateful that my loved ones were not lost but that they had gone to Source and were feeling the same intense joy that I was. I understood that if they were experiencing the same overwhelming and difficult to translate bliss, it would be difficult for them to contact me, even though I was desperate to hear from them. Over and over, I only had the desire to say “thank you” for being so blessed to be given the experience of understanding, on an emotional level, a tiny fraction of what God is. Before God, I was humbled, grateful, overwhelmed by an urge to express my gratitude through worship, but this wasn’t a forced or painful sensation. I felt deeply whole and loved, and the desire to worship was genuine.

In that moment, I understood that Source loved me, that Source is so much bigger and more difficult to understand than any of the world religions’ concept of God is, than anything I can put in language or art or any human creation I could make, and that the purpose of human incarnation is to “catch God in a bottle” for the space of the incarnation and show love to others, for the pleasure and glory of God, which is also for the pleasure and glory of each incarnation.

Basically, I felt that each incarnation is a “ride” (to steal from Bill Hicks). While we are in the incarnation, this ride (the human/material experience) can look incredibly painful and scary. We feel traumas, especially traumas like death or the fear of death, keenly, as if they will destroy us. However, that’s only our ego talking, the part of us that is just a little kid, who wants all the attention because we are hurting and the hurt feels like all there is. But our understanding is so small in the face of eternity. When we finally end our incarnation and cross the veil again, it will be like stepping off the roller coaster. We will be so grateful! We don’t want to miss it. The ride is short. So, we should try to remember that we’re having fun, that we will understand once we are back at Source again, that we will be eager to “go again” when the time comes.

At some point, I progressed to wanting to get this message across to my trip sitters, which may have been a mistake. I took on the persona of death, the trickster (I literally believed that the mushrooms were God’s messenger speaking through me personified as death), and tried to explain that God/Source loved them, and all the world, incredibly intensely and desperately wanted them to understand how much. (I was very frustrated that I couldn’t communicate this to them in language without losing the thread again and again.) I went on to say that everything they feared was both important because it was a lesson that Source wanted them to learn and incredibly unimportant because the space of an incarnation is a blip, the space of a breath to God, and we will soon go back to Source to do it all over again. I begged them to treat each other with kindness and to understand that our rejection of things that are frightening (such as the death of loved ones) is keeping us from learning the lesson Source has for us and enjoying the ride. I asked them to record me and, at points, even stood up on the couch or the stair landing as if it was a stage. My trip sitters tell me that I was “fun,” and while I looked to them like I was having an incredibly spiritual experience, I also looked quite silly.

After the active part of the high, I fell into something like a twilight sleep. These dreams were much more difficult to interpret than the first part of the experience. It was as if I was in a lucid dream or active hallucination and only occasionally interacted with reality. The dreams are impossible to put into words. But the closest explanation I can give is that I had a strong belief through these dreams that waking reality is a dream too, and that the closer we are to whatever is expressed through the mushrooms (God/Ego Death/Heaven/Nirvana) the crazier and more frightening we will seem the outside world. I also had a feeling of “energies” in the air that I could draw from and that were always all around us, connecting us all together. Finally, I believed strongly that while I was experiencing deep mysteries, the outside world was not going to understand them, and I needed to be careful in how I expressed myself in the future.

(This absolutely could have been caused by the way my trip sitters reacted to things. To be fair, they had not done trip sitting many times in the past and never with someone who had taken so much. I don’t blame them for channeling their fear and concern into laughter and dismissiveness. I know from experience that is very difficult to trip sit for someone who has taken a large dose.)

At approximately 3:00 pm, I “awoke,” dissociated and seemingly depleted of all serotonin. In that moment, I felt almost as if I had failed in my quest, as if the mushrooms had found me to be unworthy and abandoned me. The incredibly insightful and emotionally intense experience felt as if it had happened to someone else, and I remember asking my trip sitter if I had taken something (for a few minutes, in fact, for whole stretches of time during my journey, I was not aware that I had deliberately taken mushrooms and that my state was self-induced).

At first, it was very difficult to integrate the experience I had with everyday life. I spent the remainder of the day mostly sleeping and doing a little bit of crying. The feeling of invalidation from my trip sitters was intensely painful, and I felt like life was pointless and that I was disconnected from all other beings. I wished strongly to go to sleep and not wake up. I ate some food around 6:00 pm (leftover lo mein, ice cream, and cake). Then, I remembered that I should take my SSRI. I took that, along with two melatonin and a sleeping pill and fell asleep around 10:00 pm (roughly twelve hours after ingestion).

After effects:

I awoke around 9:45 am today (the next morning) feeling refreshed and no longer suicidal. However, it’s been incredibly difficult to focus on material reality. For example, it took me an hour to get ready for the day when it usually takes me thirty minutes, and then I fell back into bed and slept for an additional two hours. It seems that sleeping helped me integrate some of the experience so that it no longer feels like it happened to someone else. I also don’t feel as wrapped up in what my trip sitters felt while I was high.

Conclusions:

Overall, the experience was incredible from my side, though from the perspective of my trip sitters I appeared crazy, difficult to control, and … fun. I assume from their description of me as “fun” that I was not a danger to myself or others during my trip. I’m no longer afraid of death or quite as sad about the fact that I seem largely unable to communicate with my parents who have crossed back over the veil. I hope that as I continue to behave normally in this reality – taking my medication, eating, sleeping, going to work, etc. – that I’ll fully integrate my experience and be able to incorporate it into my spirituality and belief system. I also think that while I may ingest shrooms again, I will likely wait quite a while before doing so and that when I do take them again, I will take far less. I think I did the right thing by going into the experience with spiritual intentions and trusting that I would receive wisdom even if it was difficult to accept. I plan to be very spiritually intentional when working with shrooms in the future.

*Note: From my research, I discovered that taking shrooms while on SSRIs is not recommended. I know others who journeyed without stopping their medications with no ill effects, but, as I understand it, there is a possibility of causing a serotonin storm when mushrooms are used within 30 days of taking an SSRI. Most people cannot stop taking their antidepressant medication for this length of time without very negative consequences, and to be honest, it felt dangerous to even stop my medication for three days. However, I believed I was “splitting the difference” by abstaining from my medication for a few days but not an entire month. I hoped to prevent serotonin syndrome without damaging my mental health and ending up suicidally depressed. The reason I took 8 grams of mushrooms, which is an incredibly high dose, is that I had been on my SSRI (sertraline) for more than two years. I had also read anecdotal reports that stated SSRIs tended to dull the mushroom experience because the serotonin system is the primary mechanism that mushrooms affect. In hindsight, while my experience was good, I don’t believe I’ll take such a high dose in the future, and while I may stop taking my SSRI shortly before my next journey, I intend to take it immediately after I come down.

Exp Year: 2023	ExpID: 117523
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: 41
Published: Nov 1, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Mushrooms - P. cubensis (66) : Combinations (3), Glowing Experiences (4), Mystical Experiences (9), Guides / Sitters (39), Depression (15), Hangover / Days After (46), Personal Preparation (45), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), General (1), Small Group (2-9) (17)