I went into my first mushroom session as a skeptic. I hated the culture around psychedelics, distrusted the idea of calling them “medicine,” and had no interest in spiritual revelations. I was also burned out, grieving my father, drinking too much, and struggling to feel much of anything. Six hours later, something had shifted. That night sent me looking for an answer to a question I never expected to ask: what if I had been wrong about mushrooms?
In lieu of an interview this week I thought I’d share a chapter from my new book, Shroomies. This is the second chapter and I hope you enjoy it.
I hated Burning Man. I had never been, but I still hated it. I hated yoga music, that deep- throated chanting over sitars or instrumental versions of easy listening hits. I hated patchouli and flowing robes and drum circles and radiant people with zero percent body fat who stayed well rested and spiritually complete on vegan diets. I hated hippies and hipsters and gazelle-like couples who danced equally well to techno and the Grateful Dead. I hated raves. I hated music. I hated fun. I wanted to stay home, read books, watch movies, and sink quietly into my own private malaise.
I told myself I had earned it. I had burned out as a writer, failed as an entrepreneur, and spent years away from my growing family chasing the high you get from open bars and business dinners. Nights ended in empty hotel rooms, drunk and stoned, waking at 3 a.m. to the sugar rush of metabolized booze and the anxiety of being alive.
I hated drug culture, the woozy potheads with vacant smiles, the acid heads, the candy flippers. I hated the new language of self-help, safe spaces, quests for self-discovery, bright smiles beaming up from a guru’s feet. I was a skeptic, a follower of logic and fact, not interested in finding the shape of the universe or seeing the face of God.
I didn’t like that people called LSD and peyote and ayahuasca “medicine.” To me, they were drugs, and I didn’t have time for them anymore after having sampled just a few of them in college. I had other stuff to do. It was like that guy in “Escape (The Piña Colada Song).” I was not into yoga, and I thought I had half a brain.
And yet, there I was, walking up a set of stairs into a beautiful, sun-lit loft covered in psychedelic art, full of people for whom “vibing” was a verb. I was on my way to my first mushroom session, a twee-sounding event that involved lying around while listening to music. I was honestly angry. I considered myself above all this chanting, incense, and raga music. I had been a Taoist in college, whatever that meant, but now I was an atheist with a chip on his shoulder. A broken guy whose father had just died. A man who refused to accept that he was hurt, still grieving, and had lost someone vital to his well-being.
I was a guy who had almost walked in front of a bus and was, in some odd way, proud that he had mustered the courage to even think that dark, strange thought, a thought that grated like barbed wire on his brain. My brain.
I took off my shoes outside the room and went in. I found a spot on the floor against a wall, far from everyone else. My plan was simple: take the drugs, do what they asked, then leave as soon as I could. I had brought some unwashed grapes to share, I was told this was a potluck psychedelic session, and I dumped them on a counter crowded with vegan food and chocolate.
The apartment was one big, tall room with large bay windows facing the street. There were instruments up front: a gong, a guitar, a box that looked like a cross between a xylophone and a drum. Speakers were mounted to the walls and hidden in nooks. Every surface was covered in psychedelia and crystals. Sculptures were daubed in fluorescent paint, alien shapes glowing in the low light. Others were found art pieces, like a bathroom full of bouncing rubber alien dolls. Everyone was settling in, preparing themselves. I sat with my back against the wall, waiting.
Traffic was roaring outside. Someone drove by blasting mariachi music and a bus let off a head of steam under the windows. The loft was in the heart of the city, so it was revving motorcycles, police sirens, people shouting woozily at each other. It was as far from a Zen retreat as possible. To me it was just a rich guy’s apartment outfitted with fuzzy pillows and massive crystals dumped into a non-working fireplace.
The email I had received the day before told me to make a list of intentions. I was supposed to bring something comfortable to lie on, a sleep mask, maybe a totem to focus my mind. I was supposed to write a list of things I wanted to ask the universe, an idea I found absurd. I was not going to ask the universe for anything. It had taken a lot from me. Two businesses I tried to start. A career I loved, replaced by an endless hustle. It had taken my patience, my joy, and it had taken my father.
What else did I need? I was drinking often. I had a house and a family. Guitars and a few expensive watches. I told myself I had good taste in music and books. Most days I felt calm, helped along by a steady whiskey habit. All the important things, or so I thought. All the trappings of a Brooklyn intellectual. I wrote tweets, argued about politics on Facebook, and cranked out short pieces that few people read about things few people cared about.
I listened to jazz on vinyl, for Christ’s sake.
The worst part was how feckless I felt, how useless. The one job I loved was gone, and I was cobbling together a living with gig writing and the odd full-time role that I always left after a year. When I quit my job at TechCrunch, I lost my tribe and my coworkers, and I did not want a new one. Time with those people had marked my happiest moments, when I was in demand, when my thoughts mattered. On that mushroom night, in a loft in late 2019, I saw myself as a nobody. If you had asked the people around me, they might have said otherwise. But the mind is a harsh scold. It pushes your nose into the dirt, and it makes you tally losses, not wins. It makes you think cruel things about yourself and those who love you.
Everyone there was prepared. They had big fluffy blankets and sachets of scented herbs. They wore form-fitting yoga clothes and carried vegan leather notebooks that they would use to write down all their onrushing insights. I was not ready for this. I had a dirty sleep mask from a Delta flight and a sleeping bag. I brought my sweaty yoga mat and flopped it out to claim my space. I wore the coolest clothes I owned, black drawstring pants and a white Uniqlo shirt with something ironic on it. I nursed a light hangover and did not want to be there. I came to go through a mushroom session, something I did not care to do but had been nudged into by a well-meaning friend.
This friend, a guy from Nebraska named Greg, had always been a pain. When I met him in San Francisco, he was a tight coil of nerves. A muscular little nerd into the hardest core self-help, CrossFit, genome-based diets, local honey for inflammation. He was the kind of guy who prescribed blueberries from a specific farm ten miles away to treat a cold. People at work avoided him. He was odd. I was amused.
“Buy me ice cream,” he would say as we wandered the Tenderloin in San Francisco. His diet (at that moment) called for late night sugar to trick his metabolism. I laughed and bought us whiskeys that he handed back because his web searches told him alcohol caused sadness. Little did I know.
I envied him. I envied his drive to experiment, his faith in ideas that seemed silly. He read all the studies, did all the research, and came away certain that kettlebells and pureed kale would help him live forever. Who was I to argue?
My own research said I was a fun guy. I was great between beers two and five, annoying at six to nine, and amazing again after beer ten and the first gin and tonic. I was about 300 pounds and healthy enough to outdrink most of my friends. I loved being the life of the party, loved the warmth of the first sip, hated the long night that followed, the ringing head, the rapid heartbeat, the late-night texts hunting for the next bit of fun.
I quit that job and lost touch with Greg when I stopped going to San Francisco. I was mad at everyone, so I did not reach out. One afternoon in October 2019, I ran into him in Brooklyn. The jittery guy was gone. In his place stood someone calm, steady, smiling. He tried to get me to smile. I did not trust it. What changed?
We went to a bar. He said he felt better. He pointed to my beer and said, “Stop that.” I laughed. That cold ale was my lifeline. It tasted great.
Then he told me his story. He said he got a new lease on life. He had suffered from chronic insomnia for decades. All his flailing in San Francisco, the diets, the workouts, the supplements, was about fixing that. The stuff we mocked was all about sleep and how he couldn’t get any.
He found psychedelics. Not for fun. Not like in college. Psychedelics as medicine. He wanted answers and found them in a baggie of crushed psilocybin. A few years earlier he flew to Amsterdam for a mushroom retreat. There were no formal programs in the U.S. then, so he had to travel. He wanted a serious process, not a hippie dippy sound bath. He wanted science.
They gave him mushrooms. They told him to sit quietly, do talk therapy, and listen to music. None of it was mandatory so Greg took some mushrooms and went to sleep. He slept for most of twenty-four hours. The next day he took more mushrooms and slept again. In the middle of that, the mushrooms told him he was in danger.
“They told me I was dying,” he said. He meant it. His body was talking back. It told him he had severe sleep apnea. While he slept, his throat closed, choking him. He would wake up, snort air, and fall back asleep. Repeat. Greg was not overweight. He was born with a nasal cavity that failed him. The mushrooms explained, yes, explained, that he needed to fix his nose. A doctor confirmed it. Massive occlusion. CPAP. Surgery. Months later he was healthy. He slept well, and he smiled at me with a glow that made me think he was on some experimental molecule.
The mushrooms saved his life.
After that, he became a psychedelic advocate. Plant medicine, he called it. He wrote reports and pushed for legislation. I had no idea this had happened. I only knew he seemed cooler now. Still nerdy, still Midwestern, but cooler.
I wanted that. I was taking pills I hated that made me gain weight. I woke up angry, cursing the day. I was driving my family away while hunting for something I had lost years before. Was it comfort? Respect? Control? I wasn’t sure. I hoped mushrooms could help.
So, I said yes to the session. I showed up. I rolled out my sleeping bag. I kept quiet. More folks strolled in from the outside as the air conditioners hummed and sage wafted over the crowd. Everyone had an air of beatific calm. They greeted each other like old friends, commenting on their tans. They kissed on the lips, like this might turn into an enlightened orgy if they got the fat, grumpy guy out in time.
I did not expect much. Maybe a small trip, some fun. Like many Gen Xers, I never saw psychedelics as tools. I tried them once or twice, felt odd, and stopped. I tried LSD in college. I ended up curled on a friend’s lap, saying I felt five inches tall. I never tried Ecstasy during the rave years, even though I wore big pants and danced to drum and bass. I still smoked pot when offered but never took mushrooms. They seemed risky or, more precisely, too much of an investment.
That is not quite true. I took mushrooms once in The Hague. A friend and I made tea of specially purchased magic mushrooms at a Burger King and wandered the suburbs. We ate the soggy shrooms right out of the cup because we weren’t sure how much to take. We went to a club, started dancing, and suddenly felt time stop. The club, for some reason, kept playing the chicken song repeatedly and we were enthralled. What was this sorcery? Everyone was excited for the music, and we were convinced we were at a 14-year-old’s birthday party. We fled the club and I ended up back in my hotel, hearing techno in the HVAC and thinking about the length and breadth of Madonna’s career while watching Dutch TV. It was a silly trip, signifying nothing. I expected more of that.
As the event started, we listened to the trip sitter. He was a mellow guy with long hair and an acoustic guitar habit. He had a calm voice and greeted each person, even me, the grump with a handshake or a hug. He handed out our medicine, a baggie of mushrooms and a small dose of MDMA, and began by telling a story about heaven and hell as people settled in.
“A powerful samurai came to a small monastery and asked for the difference between heaven and hell,” he said. “The monk looked him over, saw the blood on his armor and the mud on his boots, and said, ‘You are a brute. I have no time for fools like you.’ The samurai, enraged, drew his sword. His face went red. He was ready to kill the monk. The monk said, ‘That is hell.’ The samurai froze. He understood. His anger, his pride, his violence, that was hell. He lowered his sword and bowed. The monk said, ‘And that is heaven.’”
It was a good story. I later learned it was part of his usual script. At that moment, however, I was drawn in. That story, trite as it was, meant something to me. This simple tale of a samurai and a monk made me think hard about where I was in life. I felt like I was in hell but in fact I was in a place of privilege with a bunch of nice white folks who weren’t out to hurt me but instead wanted to listen to music and take some mushrooms. I was safe, I had enough money for this experience, and I was going to be OK. My head was making my own hell.
We each took half of a four-gram bag of powdered mushrooms. The sitter said it was Golden Teacher, a strong strain known to be gentle on beginners. I poured my share into my mouth and lay back with the mask over my eyes.
An hour passed. We did breathing exercises meant to calm the nervous system. The facilitator said the Vagus nerve runs from the brainstem through the chest to the gut. It helps regulate heart rate, digestion, and mood. When parasympathetic activity rises, the body shifts from fight or flight toward calm. Chanting can help. Long, low sounds, like single, drawn-out notes or steady humming, vibrate the throat and increase vagal activity and heart-rate variability. It is not mystical. It is physical. It signals safety to the body. Many religious traditions use chanting, the most familiar being the “Om” in Yoga.
We took two more grams and some MDMA.
About six hours later, I came out of a meditative state, the most joyful I had ever known.
In that meditation, I flew through a fractal tunnel that folded on itself like origami made of light. I saw castles of color and faces smiling at me through vines of neon green. I became sound, became breath, became a dot of light that grew to infinity and back. The music was alive. Notes and rhythm and timbre made new sense. It carried me through the hours like a silver boat on dark water. I still remember every note of Leon Bridges’ “River,” as if it were played inside my bones, each breath and each guitar slide bursting like fireworks in my mind.
The song hit hard. Something cracked. Like the Grinch. Like Scrooge. Like a cartoon figure curled tight with anger that suddenly stretched out. My chest opened. I breathed, finally.
I felt okay.
The MDMA capsule, explained the trip sitter, was a buffer for the intensity. It did not make things happy. It made them kinder. It made the mushrooms put on a warm sweater.
I cried. Quietly. Not sobbing. Just tears. They rolled without warning, like someone turned a valve. I saw my father. I heard his voice, not booming with anger, but soft, like when he explained things to me as a kid. He told me I did not have to be sad. That I did not have to carry all this anger and shame and guilt.
I believed him.
Later, we did a scream session. We opened our mouths, stretched, and howled. It was silly. It was primal. It felt foolish and freeing at once. Then we shouted love into the world. Again, silly, but I meant it. For a moment, I meant it.
We were told to visit our inner child. We had to picture a wide field. A tree. A small version of me under it. Go to him. Hold him.
I did.
Big, grumpy me walked up to that tiny kid in my mind, sitting alone with knees to chest, and picked him up like I pick up my own kids. I held him. I told him it was okay. That he was okay. That he could stop being afraid. That he could stop being sad. That his dad was dead but that it wasn’t the end.
It sounds corny. I know. It’s amazingly hard to talk about psychedelic trips narratively simply because they are above narrative. It sounds silly, ridiculous, like a dream after some bad cheese. Six hours earlier I would have mocked it. I did not mock it then. Something had shifted.
That night changed me.
The changes didn’t come all at once. I did not wake with a new personality or a six-pack or a certificate in advanced love. But something opened. Something softened.
I started to feel again.
That is the part few explain about depression. It is not only sadness. It is numbness. A fade into apathy. A gray fog that mutes everything. I lived in that fog for years. The mushrooms pierced it.
After that night, I was curious. Not only about psychedelics, but about why they worked. Why did psilocybin make me feel okay for the first time in years? Why did it help when therapy and pills and booze did not?
I started reading. Then I started growing. My kids called the jars in the basement our smelly mushroom roommates, our shroomies. The basement smelled like loam. I leaned into the lore of mushrooms and learned how to grow them in the same way I used to make wine and beer. I became the neighborhood mushroom guy.
I took them on a schedule. Not to get high, but to stay even. Small doses. Enough to take the edge off without drifting into bright colors. I started therapy. I drank less. I slept better. I was calmer. I was kinder. Slowly, I came back.
And I still had questions.
Why do these odd fungi, with names like Penis Envy and Jedi Mind Fuck, work so well? Why do they help with grief, trauma, depression, and self-hate? Are they really medicine? Could they be better than the pills I took for years? Are they dangerous? Or was I taught wrong?
I am a journalist. When something confuses me, I ask questions.
That is what this book is about. How mushrooms are changing lives. How they changed mine. How they help our minds, ease grief, and remind us to be human. It is about people, scientists, therapists, growers, skeptics, trying to understand what these ancient organisms offer.
I chose to grow eight strains, from Golden Teacher to Jedi Mind Fuck. I tried Blue Meanies. I grew the infamous Penis Envy. I talked to people who heal with mushrooms and people who warn against them. I tried to learn what happened to me in that dumb loft.
For this book I talked to almost a hundred people about their mushroom use. Most shared the same arc. They were down. They were in trouble. Mushrooms helped them back up. They reopened faith and love, helped rebuild ties, pulled people from deep depressions. They taught people to take pleasure again, helped with recovery after loss, and helped one woman sing and dance after years of early onset dementia. They helped people live, and they helped people die.
They helped me.
This is the story of how mushrooms cracked my heart open.
It is also the story of how they might do the same for you.