My experience at MycoMeditations was all that I had hoped for and much more. After much research I... read more
My experience at MycoMeditations was all that I had hoped for and much more. After much research I... read more
I work as a psychiatric provider in the US, and my wife works PT at this retreat and advised me to... read more
Out of 5 stars, I would give them 20! Wow! What an experience! Thank you so much to everyone at MycoMeditations and Doranja House! Specifically, I would like to give a hat tip to the following folks:
1. Justin Townsend: He was my Morpheus and mentor within the trip space. Keeping a watchful eye on all participants, he seemed to feel out the dynamic like an omnidirectional antenna. He made sense of the space and brought a sense of calm and kindness to all.
2. Bénédicte (Ben) Bergouignan: She was a loving and compassionate mentor for me in the trip space. Her playful and gentle approach to therapy masked her powerful ability to make sense of another’s struggles and tease them out into conscious awareness.
3. Doreen Gordan: Doreen and her husband own the Doranja House. They provided food and accommodations during my stay with them. Doreen’s light-hearted nature amazed me as she worked hard preparing food, keeping up with the responsibilities around the property, and doing laundry for guests. I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface.
4. Dan Such (and Lolo), Matt Gasmovic, Nickesha Strachan, Ruschiene Deidrick, and Athena Rose: These facilitators were amazing. Their organization, caring, and professionalism truly made for a fantastic experience.
Thank you all for your kindness and generosity! Of course, special thanks to Eric Osbourne for being the driving force behind MycoMeditations. His hard work and personal risk to make mushroom treatments available to others cannot be understated. He is truly amazing.
Apologies if I have left anyone off the list. It was not intentional.
I have struggled in all of the areas below. For some, I have seen some obvious relief. For others, it’s too hard to tell until I get more time under my belt to review the changes. For the record, this is my running list of things that sent me seeking answers and relief in Jamaica. I had tried talking with a psychologist with little tangible change. I had sought out books for each area to approach the behaviors with the “best practices”. Similarly, my obsessive reading or audible listening along these subject matter themes produce little tangible result. Our family would take long vacations in Europe, and I would hope that the context switch would help disrupt the bad habits. Nothing really worked.
1. About seven years ago I had a stroke in my left cerebellum. I had consistent migraines. I wanted to see if the neural plastic changes might help with some of the effects that I had seen in my life.
2. I started getting new aches and pains. My lower back and neck have had hair triggers resulting in some sort of spinal discomfort for about the last 20 years. At around 15, I fell from a tree landing on my neck and suffered a compression fracture on two vertebrae. I suspected that some of my issues were related to those old injuries and maybe muscular imbalances due to both my job and inconsistent exercise.
3. I was very socially anxious and found that I was isolating myself from others. I was judgmental and sarcastic. I knew I was getting on my wife’s nerves. I didn’t know how to turn it off. It seemed to be hardwired to my internal sense of frustration. I didn’t want to propagate my bad habits. Additionally, my wife would want to go dancing and I would avoid it like the plague. Another indicator of my dysfunctional social behavior had to do with some obsessive behaviors. If I got too nervous, I would find myself almost uncontrollably looking at women in “socially unacceptable ways”. In almost all social settings, my hands would sweat, and I would try too hard in the conversations. None of my social interactions felt authentic. It seemed the mystery that others can relax into the social setting whereas it always seems so contrived for me.
4. I was having problems sleeping. I wake up in the middle of the night unable to fall back asleep.
5. I was becoming a workaholic and having very difficult time with work life balance. I think I was hiding from my emotional imbalances. I enjoy my work, but I was taking it too far. I knew my emotional imbalances were getting worse.
6. After issues between my family of origin not wanting me to marry my wife, I ended up losing about 30 people on my side of the family in order to preserve my marriage. The games were too much. As a result, I was depressed about the loss of those relationships and the feeling of betrayal that the people I had loved so much could not find a way to take responsibility and reconcile the situation. Loss of my family left me feeling like a boat without an anchor. Each time a special occasion like a birthday, Thanksgiving, or Christmas would roll around, I wouldn’t know if I would react in joy or complete depression. There were times I just wanted to be isolated from my wife and kid and cry in my own self-pity.
7. I have a lot of obsessive behaviors. I’d bite my fingernails and find myself constantly trolling the kitchen for food.
8. I found very little joy in activities that required responsibilities like working in the kitchen. This resulted in struggles between my wife and I. I wouldn’t want to cook or clean the kitchen. Having to make lunchboxes for a kid for school was also taxing. It’s not like it was realistically a major strain on me, and I felt very childish knowing that I had to reluctantly get up and knock it out.
9. Shame. I had been shamed and bullied my whole life. I grew up in a dysfunctional family that used sarcasm and humiliation to control me. My family was also emotionally unavailable especially while I was being bullied in school. They would embarrass and make a fool of me in front of others. I was the black sheep of the family and trained to be a people pleaser. I didn’t know how to form healthy relationships with others. My first healthy relationship was to my wife when I got married. I trusted her intuition when mine would lead me astray.
Outcomes
My time at MycoMeditations in Jamaica has already made a huge difference in my well-being.
1. If I was stressed and falling asleep, my hands would clench and spasm as I tried to relax. The abrupt arm and leg movements after the stroke had the effect of disrupting my relaxation and keeping my wife always nervous that something was going wrong with me. The first trip seemed to engage this aspect of my nervous system, and when it was through, it felt like there was some significant neural plasticity and my brain was being rewired. While it’s still too early to see the long-term effects, the results were almost immediately noticeable for me.
2. I had gotten to the point that if I didn’t have the right pillow under the perfect conditions, I would get migraines either during the night or the next morning. The migraines morphed and changed over time. I became a connoisseur of headaches. The latest version had plagued me for the last year and a half to two years and occurred at the base of my skull down my spinal column to my mid neck. Things were getting triggered at least once a week sometimes more often. If I caught it early by taking Maxalt and Tylenol, I could mitigate the effects. Otherwise, I would lose half of the day laying in bed with the pulsing pain. It’s still quite early to see how the effects will shake out over time, but I felt almost instant relief. The pillow that I was sleeping on was far worse than my pillow at home. And other than a stiff neck, I felt no pain.
3. When I first got to Jamaica, my social anxiety was running at full steam. I didn’t know how to use my attention. Once the novelty of the changing scenery was over and we were at our destination, I found myself stuck in a large group of strangers where I was socially anxious and trying to fit in. My shame kicked up as I felt I was constantly trying too hard, interrupting people, and pushing people away. I would go to my room to journal so that I could disrupt the negative emotions. After the first trip, the social anxiety had simply turned off. It was replaced with a sense of empathy that was totally unexpected and very refreshing. My dysfunctional ways of interacting with people had lessened to about 10% of their initial levels. There was something significant going on here and that was just trip one. I felt a sense of well-being that I could lean into during the social interactions. This gave me a sense of patience.
4. While in Jamaica, I had sleeping problems but for different reasons. I had been traveling so much that I was suffering from significant jet lag and I’m highly sensitive to heat. Jamaica was hot, very hot. The room we were staying in had air conditioning, but I decided to tough out the environment. As a result, sleeping was always a bit of a challenge. When I got home immediately after Jamaica, I wanted to sleep at ton. It’s still a bit too early to know how this will play out in the future, but my sleep has been wholesome and refreshing. This was true even under the significant temperature differences in Jamaica, and while I was probably only getting between 4-5 hours of sleep a night there.
5. The state of being a workaholic may not change. I still love my job and I’m very curious by nature. I’m okay with that should it arise. It will just give me another reason to visit Jamaica again and the paycheck to do it. Since returning home, it has been difficult turning on my left brain. I feel like I have gotten so much out of the experience and I’m still subconsciously processing a bunch of loose ends. I’m starting off my work week slowly to be kind to myself.
6. The attachment fears from my family have somewhat been relieved. Again, I have to caveat this with the fact that it’s still too early to tell. Before I make some definitive statement, I would like at least one year to ride out the emotional triggers of the holidays to see if strong negative or depressive emotion is conjured. I will say this though. The deep sense of loneliness that I felt as a result of losing my family was somewhat replaced by the tribe of strangers that became friends during my time in Jamaica. In the one week that I was there, I had so many in-depth and intimate conversations with the people I experienced this with that I feel a sense of connectedness that I haven’t felt in years. I feel loved again by these people that I had just met. And, I felt a deep sense of loving them. I wouldn’t have been able to say that in the past. Not only did I have a new tribe, I also had a means to build new intimate relationships or revive existing relationships. The mushrooms and MycoMeditations offered a path.
7. In terms of my obsessive behaviors, they have eased. If I were to rank my level of obsessiveness, I would say that my current state is about 20% of that in which I entered the experience with. It seems as though some mental space was injected into my thought processes giving me both patience and the ability to evaluate the behavior prior to engaging with it. I can see the weakened obsessive response spin up and not have to engage it immediately. This holds true for my desire to interrupt, bite my fingernails, run to the refrigerator for a snack, etc. We’ll see how this plays out over time. I’m optimistic. The mushrooms shook up the snow globe, and I now have the ability to build more positive habits rather than feeling stonewalled against my old negative habits.
8. Similarly to the above, I feel like the mushrooms have introduced a level of patience that I can lean into when I have responsibilities. I realize that I have to be the cocreator in this process and things will not happen in autopilot. But, I now feel more of a sense of lightness and openness that I can take with me instead of leaning strictly on willpower. In the coming weeks, I plan to use this lightness to enable me to build new habits that bolster positive changes in my lifestyle.
9. It was interesting during my second trip. I seemed to have merged with infinity and come back. While that sounds very abstract and like there might not be much to take home from the experience, it had the effect of making all of my problems seem so negligible in the grand scheme of things. Consciously looking back at the sense of shame I see it more like a problem with my use of attention. And, having a new way of focusing my mind, I believe that it will significantly alter my experience and my relationship with shame and my emotional baggage. I’m optimistic. I’m even open to taking my wife dancing as long as there are lessons first.
One of the biggest takeaways that I got from this experience was a sense that I cocreated a mental model within the trip space that was applicable to me outside of the trip space in my everyday life. While this mental model may be abstract if I tried to describe it to others, it makes perfect sense to me through all of the semantic hooks that I was able to generate during the trip. I cocreated these hooks and the mental model by querying the abstractions in my minds eye with the problems and the constraints that I felt in the real world. This process enabled me to generate a construct that stitched together all three trips into a single cohesive experience that provided me with a sense of wisdom. The sense of meaninglessness and injustice of the world now seems a naïve way of interpreting my experience. Instead, I realize the ebb and flow of the universe in a way that makes sense to me. And, I feel more capable of grappling with reality in a way that makes me feel light and fluid. This is a true blessing and one that I was not able to anticipate prior to the experience.
Hi TJ,
Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to write this in-depth, full review of all that you felt and experienced on your Myco retreat. You're one of a kind.
We appreciate your dedication, both shown here and in all the work you accomplished on the retreat.
Take care!
I recently attended a one week retreat at Myco Meditations. WOW! This retreat blew my mind away. The facilitators were beyond excellent. Justin, as the retreat leader, has an innate ability to sense what someone needs before they even know it. Ben lead many deep and healing guided meditations. Dan, Matt, Nickesha and Ruschiene ensured all participants were safe at all times – physically and emotionally. The sense of community I experienced there, with the facilitators, staff and other guests, was 11 on a scale of 1-10. Everyone gets to speak openly and judgment free. Each and every guest (including myself) had major breakthroughs during the week. Lots of tears and lots of laughter. Other guests are now like family to me.
I had been through traditional therapy and medications before - on and off since college. Nothing healed me like a week at Myco with these amazing people. I came away feeling like my soul has been cleansed. I highly recommend Myco for anyone seeking to heal their heart, mind and soul.
Hi Lisa,
Thank you for sharing, and we deeply respect the strength and willingness to heal that you showed while on retreat. It was a pleasure to have you :)
I had an amazing week at MycoMeditations in Jamaica. It was transformational. Eric, Courtney, Dan, Ruschienne and the entire staff are warm, engaging, knowledgable, kind, funny and smart with years of experience deep in psychedelics. The location, accomodations, food and activities are all as nice, yummy and appealing as can be. I met other awesome humans traveling and exploring the inner workings of our minds and our world, and am better off for having spent a week with each and every one. I can't speak highly enough of the experience—recommend putting your fears aside and truly consider this beatiful opportunity.
Hi Patti!
Thank you for sharing about your experience in this review. We're happy to have hosted you and we hope the lessons have continued long after the retreat!
A truly healing experience, in a beautiful setting with experienced, kind facilitators. Imagine getting 2 years of therapy in a week! It was difficult and intense, but my life is forever changed for the better. I had multiple breakthroughs that allowed me to fully accept and move on from past traumas, and to be open and accepting of what the future will bring. The multiple sessions allowed me to go as deeply as I needed, with wonderful support.
Do your research first, and if you think psilocybin can help you, this is the organization that can get results. (Some participants were not there for healing but for a spiritual journey, and they professed to be as satisfied with the experience as I was.)
Eric and Courtney have put together an excellent team. There is a strong emphasis on safety and much is done to help you trust the personnel. I felt a profound trust and connection to them all.
As a bonus, the food and the setting are top-notch. The Blue Marlin property is gorgeously landscaped with tropical trees and flowers. Hammocks can be found in several places. Meals are served under a roof of bougainvilleas. The beach is amazing for swimming or long walks. It was spectacular.
Hi there! We appreciate you taking the time to write a review.
It's awesome to hear about your experience, and all the great things you took away from it.
Wishing you all the best in a future full of healing and growth, The MycoMeditations Team
My wife and I attended the 2019 August 10 - 17 retreat.
As someone who has had decades of some relief from clinical depression and PTSD via fluoxetine (Prozac), I stay current in mental health research as best I can. Having seen the recent resurgence in psychedelics for the treatment of these disorders, I looked into participating in such a study. The age limit for participants is 65. I am 66.
Fortunately, I also discovered this retreat. I researched Eric’s (the founder of MM) history and read several reviews from those who went before. The few negative reviews I found were from people who wanted to run the retreat their way (exotic dancing, “certified” clinicians, blah blah blah).
Well, this retreat is run in a caring, safe environment by people experienced with the use of psychedelics and in facilitating the psychedelic experiences of others. A nurse is also present at each psychedelic event.
Each of my three ‘trips’ were on my terms. For one, I mimicked the John Hopkins study by using a blindfold and the music playlist they used. Another was sans music while walking around the grounds. Finally, one was without blindfold and my own playlist of music I love.
Perhaps my most significant trip was the (lowest dose) walking around trip. The point is that I was free to explore the best ways to make beneficial use of my experiences. An experience that I believe should be available to anyone in a free country.
I am again taking fluoxetine. My experiences did not ‘fix’ me. Eric told me (and everyone else) ahead of time that shrooms are not a magic bullet. While I had hope, I had no expectations from my experiences.
My journey continues. I have new friends to whom I can reach out. I am very happy that I found and experienced MM. Best to you and your journey. Oh, and it’s hot in Jamaica. I found short sleeved button down shirts to be more comfortable than tee shirts.
My sessions with Myco Meditations were among the most profound experiences of my life. I am grateful to have undertaken a great soul adventure under their auspices. I relied on their advice for all aspects of my journey, and was glad I did. They know more about you the minute you walk in the door than you will learn about yourself over the next year. Money can't buy what the Myco team does for you.
Our group leader Justin is a seasoned voyageur. He knows well the psychedelic landscape, and how to respond to all manner of demands. If you are going where no man has gone before, he's the guide you want at your side. Like Kit Carson in the Rocky Mountains, he's probably been there before. He has a command of the psychedelic literature and understands Jung's map of the psyche.
The facilitators are beyond incredible. These young people are themselves gifted in many different ways, with pure hearts and knowing eyes. I tremble to think of the powerful force for good they are becoming on behalf of their generation. You can trust them to watch over you and insure a safe return.
There is no way to really compensate the MycoMed team for what they did for me, and for many others every day of the week. There is no training for their art. Words fail any attempt to describe what they really did, and do every day. Suffice it to say they are guiding you and protecting you on many simultaneous levels: physical, emotional, psychic, energetic.
Hey there Lance, thank you for the review and we're really thrilled that your experience at MycoMeditations provided you with so much. Thank you for the kind words about our team :)