I Spent a Decade Studying Psilocybin Mushrooms Before I Finally Listened to Them

We don't need more research on psilocybin. We don't need to read more trip reports or more Netflix documentaries on the subject. We need to start building a relationship with these most magical of mushrooms.

I say that as someone who spent over a decade mainly studying them — and I mean that as a confession, not a credential.

This is not to say research doesn't have its place. But in many ways, we have the process backwards. For the first ten years of my relationship with sacred mushrooms, I looked at them the way we look at most medicines: a material substance consumed for its effect on the consumer. Input and output. But they are so much more than that.

The threshold moment came during a solo ceremony in 2013, shortly before I met Courtney Rose. By then I had been cultivating indoors and harvesting gourmet mushrooms for around ten years. From 2003 on, psilocybin was always growing in my closet. After moving to a farm in Paoli, Indiana, where I eventually started Magnificent Mushrooms, my commercial gourmet mushroom operation, the opportunity to grow and consume psilocybin mushrooms on a much larger scale finally presented itself.

One evening I found myself pacing circles in my gravel driveway beneath a black blanket of stars. And for the first time, after years of talking to the mushrooms, I heard them talking to me.

The gravel lane where everything changed

I know how that sounds. But the experience has repeated itself enough times since that night that I no longer feel the need to apologize for saying it.

What I heard wasn't a voice exactly — it was more like a sudden awareness. Each species of mushroom seemed to be singing a distinct song. Not one I could hear with my ears, but one I felt in my chest.

Then came the realization that stopped my pacing cold.

One of the first skills any serious mushroom cultivator learns is tissue culturing, excising a small piece of a living mushroom, placing it on nutritive agar, and creating an exact genetic clone of the parent. I had been doing this for years. What struck me that night was the realization that cloning the same shiitake, oyster, lion's mane, and cubensis for five years meant I had been consuming the same organism in each species, year after year. These weren't fruits from separate trees. They were more like cuts from the same animal.

Each strain even had a name. The shiitake was Old Faithful — dense, reliable, never disappointing. The oyster was Stripes, for the characteristic markings on its caps. The lion's mane was Big Boy, for obvious reasons. The chanterelles were simply the Chanties; from a single patch I'd been harvesting for years. And the cubensis, my favorite, was a strain I had developed myself and named Mr. E, what my students had called me during seven years of teaching middle school.

Myself, my son Jacob and our shiitake 'Old Faithful'

My family and I had been eating more than five pounds of mushrooms a week. My body was, in a very literal sense, built out of the organisms I grew. In that bemushroomed state, the realization took on an almost cannibalistic character. Who was growing who?

This led into a period of genuine paranoia, as I began to see in retrospect how much of my life seemed to have been guided, or dare I say, shaped, by the mushroom. And then, nearly paralyzed by all of it, I simply stopped and listened. The hum of my beloveds was still there. And slowly I was reminded that yes, the mushrooms had been my teachers all along, and I couldn't have asked for better ones. What had begun as a disturbing realization slowly opened into something else entirely: a relationship with such depth and warmth that it has never stopped revealing unfolding.

Those of you who have been around Psanctuary for a while have heard me talk about the Ovoids calling me to where they are. That is true. And it could only have happened because I was willing, eventually, to stop studying them like a scientist and start listening to them like a friend. Which is what I want to encourage you to do.

Hanging out with friends

This is also why we created My Mushroom Map. This on-demand, six-part series is an invitation to develop your own relationship with this sacrament, rooted in the way we practice at Psanctuary.

While I will forever be a student of the mushroom, I'll leave the research up to the academics — they will eventually prove what we already experientially know. These mushrooms have an intelligence, an awareness, and dare I say an intention to help humans grow closer to God, closer to nature, and perhaps most importantly, closer to each other. You are invited to join me and others in our community as we nurture this relationship with one of Earth's oldest organisms.