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A Psanctuary Initiative
July 22
GLOBAL DOSE DAY
A DAY OF REMEMBRANCE, REVERENCE, AND QUIET REVOLUTION.
Honoring the birthday of Mazatec curandera María Sabina,
and the sacred mushroom she called los niños santos — the little holy children.
Micro or macro. Meditation or movement. Study or stillness. Every path is welcome.
July 22 at 1 PM EST
Participation is voluntary and rests entirely with each individual.
Always follow your local laws. We do not encourage or facilitate any illegal activity.
This is not medical, legal, or dosing advice. Full statement
The Invitation
WE GATHER TO REMEMBER A WOMAN
WHO GAVE EVERYTHING.
We gather - online, and in living rooms, gardens, chapels, fields, and forests — to remember a woman who gave everything and was left with almost nothing.
María Sabina did not ask to be famous. She asked to be of service to the sick. What came instead was a flood of strangers, cameras, and appetite. Her home was burned. Her son was killed. She died poor.
So, we begin honestly. This is a celebration of our sacrament, and we cannot leave out the truth of what happened to the woman who brought it to the world. Let this be a day of return — of attention, of intention, of gratitude, of repair.
On July 22, we invite you to sit down and pay attention. To sit in silence before we celebrate. To breathe. To pray, in whatever tongue prayer comes to you. To walk somewhere green and say thank you out loud. To gather with friends and speak truthfully to each other. To read her words and hear their wisdom instead of talking over them.
CONSCIOUSNESS EXPANDS IN ALL DIRECTIONS.
ON THIS DAY, WE PRACTICE THE DIRECTION OF LISTENING.
Why July 22,
TWO WOMEN.
TWO HEMISPHERES.
THE BIRTHDAY OF MARÍA SABINA
Mazatec curandera, poet, wisdom keeper. Born, it is believed, in 1894 in Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca — and named, it is said, for the Holy Mother whose feast falls on the same day.
THE FEAST OF MARY MAGDALENE
The woman who stayed, who witnessed, who was named apostle to the apostles and then written down as something lesser.
Two women. Two hemispheres. Both knew something firsthand and were then narrated by men who had not been there. We let them stand side by side distinct and whole.
THE 3 MOVEMENTS
OF THE DAY
REMEMBER
Study her life. Read her Vida. Listen to the recordings made of her before she understood what they would become.
PRACTICE
Sit. Breathe. Sing. Walk. Fast. Grieve. Give thanks. Choose a contemplative practice and give it real time.
RETURN
Give something back. To Mazatec-led organizations. To land defense. To the people who kept this alive at cost.
Who is behind this day?
A CONGREGATION.
NOT A COMPANY.
Global Dose Day is an initiative of Psanctuary, a non-profit sacred mushroom church founded in Kentucky.
Psanctuary is an inter-tradition community built on spiritual autonomy, peer support, and communal care — not on gurus, celebrity shamans, or expensive retreat packages. There is no single doctrine other than sacred mushrooms are our sacrament. Members come from every background and tradition, united by a shared, sincere practice with the sacrament. The church gathers for weekly Sunday Service, ceremony, study, and mutual support, and sustains itself through membership and donation rather than commerce. The Tao te Ching is our central sacred text.
Peer-supported congregation
Non-profit, not a retreat
Spiritual autonomy
That model is the reason this day exists in the form it does. A church that survives on peer support has no product to sell you on María Sabina's birthday. What it has instead is a congregation willing to sit with our sacrament for a few hours, tell the truth about what happened, integrate together, and support the traditions that safeguarded our sacrament despite oppression.
Psanctuary holds no authority over Mazatec tradition and claims no lineage within it. Our practice is devotional and our own. What we offer this day is attention, sustained study, and a willingness to organize.
As we move toward 2027 and beyond, we stand in allyship with Indigenous knowledge keepers, supporting land rights, cultural preservation, and the return of sovereignty over traditional medicines wherever possible.
About Maria Sabina & the Day
THE WISE ONE
OF HUAUTLA
She was born into the Sierra Mazateca in 1894, in the mountain town of Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca. Her father died when she was small. She and her sister were raised in poverty, and as a child she began eating the mushrooms that grew in the hills after rain.
She called them los niños santos — the little holy children. The little saints. The little ones that speak.
She did not describe them as a substance. She described them as something that speaks when you are quiet enough to hear it. They came, in her account, not to entertain her but to give her the Book the great Book of language, from which she read what she needed to know about a sick person and what would heal them.
WHAT A VELADA WAS
The velada - the vigil — was not a gathering for experience. It was a night of work.
It happened in darkness. It happened because someone was sick and needed to be seen. It happened with a healer who had fasted, abstained, and prepared, and who took the medicine alongside the sick person in order to diagnose and to intercede - not to guide a passenger through a journey.
And it happened through singing. María Sabina's chants were the instrument. Long, spiraling, hours-deep — naming herself again and again in the third person as she moved through the work:
"I AM A WOMAN WHO LOOKS INTO THE INSIDES OF THINGS. I AM A WOMAN WHO EXAMINES. I AM A WOMAN OF THE GREAT EXPANSE OF THE WATER. I AM A WOMAN WHO IS A WHIRLPOOL."
She was Catholic. She named saints and Christ alongside the older names. This was the outcome of five centuries of Mazatec people surviving conquest by carrying their sacrament inside forms the conquerors would permit. That layering is itself a technology of survival, and it deserves to be understood rather than treated as 'traditional'.
WHAT HAPPENED
In 1955, an American banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson came to Huautla. She agreed to hold a velada for him. She said later that she believed he had come as a sick man seeking help. She would not have done it otherwise.
In 1957, Life magazine ran his account. It was a sensation. Though it did not name her or her village, her identity and location eventually became known to the wider world.
What followed was an arrival. Seekers, tourists, journalists, celebrities, and holidaymakers poured into Huautla for years. The town was overrun. The Mexican government sent police. Her neighbors blamed her for what she had let in.
Her house was burned down. Her son was killed. She was jailed briefly. She lost standing in her own community. She lived out her final years in poverty and died in 1985.
Of the men who wrote books about her and built reputations on that night, she saw effectively nothing.
HER OWN VERDICT
She said that from the moment the foreigners came, the holy children lost their purity. That they lost their force. That they were ruined.
WE DO NOT GET TO SKIP PAST THE PAST THAT MAKES US UNCOMFORTABLE.
It was one of the most important things said about these mushrooms we are all now so interested in, and it was said by the only person present with the standing to say it. Any project touching her name — this one included — has to sit inside that judgment rather than around it.
We do not answer her here. The answer, if there is one, is the sixth pathway.
WHY WE HOLD THIS DAY ANYWAY
We hold this day because the alternative is silence, and silence has served the extraction very well. Silence perpetuates the colonial theft of a sacrament that belongs to humanity — a medicine that cannot be patented, that no one holds proprietary rights over.
We hold this day because her name is already everywhere — on retreat brochures, on capsule packaging, on the pitch decks of companies that will make fortunes from what she was left poor for — and almost nowhere is her actual biography told, or her actual grief quoted.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS DAY IS CORRECTIVE.
We hold July 22 not to claim her, but to commune in her honor, to do the small ordinary work of remembering a real woman as accurately as we can, and to turn some portion of the attention and money now flowing through this movement back toward the people it came from.
That is the day. It is not a spectacle. It is a debt being partially, imperfectly acknowledged.
Why a Church convened this day
A CHURCH THAT CANNOT MONETIZE IS A CHURCH THAT CANNOT REPEAT THE PATTERN.
Psanctuary is a non-profit sacred mushroom church. Psilocybin is our sacrament. We are an inter-tradition community - no clergy standing between a person and the sacrament, no shaman selling access. Members come from Christian, Buddhist, pagan, agnostic, and unaffiliated backgrounds, united only by a sincere practice and a commitment to spiritual autonomy.
We are also, by choice, a non-profit. Psanctuary runs on membership and donation rather than retreat fees. This is not modesty; it is the point. The history of this sacrament in Western hands is a history of extraction of people arriving, taking, and monetizing what they took. A Church that cannot monetize is a church that cannot repeat that pattern.
Our founders were arrested for psilocybin mushrooms in 2015 and have spent the decade since building an institution that treats them as a sacrament rather than a product. Our position on the mushroom is spiritual, not commercial or clinical. We think the clinics and the therapists are doing real good - and we also think there is something in this medicine that a clinical container cannot hold.
Global Dose Day arose out of that practice. It is offered in devotion, not authority. We are not curanderos. We hold no standing in Mazatec tradition and do not claim her lineage. We are students of a teacher none of us could have met, and we believe the remembering of María Sabina is work anyone can do — and that someone should
How to participate
SIX PATHWAYS.
EVERY PATH IS WELCOME.
Global Dose Day does not provide dosing guidance. In most of the world, including most of the United States, possessing psilocybin is a criminal offense - and a global call to consume, on her birthday, in her name, would be a strange way to demonstrate that we listened. Every pathway below is available to every person on earth, legally, tonight.
REMEMBER & PRACTICE
The velada happened at night, in the dark, in silence broken only by song. You can keep a vigil.
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Sit in complete darkness for one to three hours. No screen, no light, no music at first. This is harder than it sounds, and it is the whole point.
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Fast for the day beforehand, if your health permits. Abstinence and simplicity preceded the work.
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Hold someone in mind. The velada was never abstract. It was for a specific sick person. Name yours. Sit for them.
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Speak aloud at some point. Prayer, petition, apology, thanks — whatever is true.
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Do not seek an experience. Seek the person you named.
However you participate
SIT WITH US.
TELL SOMEONE.
GO DEEPER INTO THE HISTORY.
Share what you did with #WorldDoseDay and #GlobalDoseDay — and share what you gave, not
only what you felt. Subscribe to receive reflections, reading lists, and gathering guides in the days leading up to July 22.
Come sit with us.
Psanctuary holds practice, study and mutual care year round.
Go deeper into the history.
The Psychedelic Reformation. Maria Sabina is central to it.
Tell someone.
Share the pathways and invite friends into the day.
Safety, Legality & Responsibility.
ONE STATEMENT.
LINK FROM EVERYWHERE.
Global Dose Day is a cultural, spiritual, and educational observance honoring María Sabina and the traditions that preserved this sacrament.
Psanctuary does not provide, distribute, or facilitate access to any controlled substance. We do not encourage or facilitate illegal activity. Any engagement with sacred mushrooms is a private decision made by consenting adults in accordance with their local laws. Nothing here constitutes medical, psychological, legal, or dosing advice.
If you have made your own decision: approach with reverence, preparation, attention to set and setting, and a plan for integration. Consult healthcare professionals where appropriate - particularly regarding cardiac conditions, personal or family history of psychosis, and medication interactions (SSRIs, MAOIs, lithium).
HARM REDUCTION RESOURCES
Fireside Project
Peer support line
Dancesafe
Harm reduction
Zendo Project
My Mushroom Map
Psychedelic support
Safety. Legality. Integration
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