Beyond the Rx and Into the Magic Mushroom Forest
What heart-opening herbs, a trusted healer, and a special cup of “tea” taught me about peace, love and understanding.
So, here's something I never thought I'd write: I recently took mushrooms with my chiropractor. Not in a raving, Burning Man, glitter-pants kind of way. There were no glow sticks. No jungle beats. No leather chaps or animal pelts. Just me, my long-time healer, a minimalist apartment, and a desperate desire to relieve my depression.
Let me rewind.
I needed to do something to cure myself from a myriad of chronic ailments that were derailing my life. When I discovered dry-fasting, I decided to give it a try. Crazy at it sounded, it promised a lot. Total recovery, in fact, from whatever ailed me. After finishing my third 9-day dry fast in the space of three months, I expected to feel like I’d just eaten a York Peppermint Patty.
Instead, I spiraled. Hard. I cried sporadically. I couldn’t concentrate. My right elbow radiated pain, and my fingers kept going numb while I tried to power through my writing assignments. Depression pulled up like an overdue 2 train, and I stepped on, resigned but familiar with its route.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Of course you were depressed! You didn’t eat or drink for a month. That’s not a cleanse; that’s a hunger strike!”
But here’s the thing: dry fasting triggers autophagy. Autophagy releases toxins. And where do those toxins go? The bloodstream—and sometimes, the brain. And what is depression if not inflammation of the brain wearing a very convincing Eeyore costume?
Cut to: my chiropractor’s table this past Monday, where I was having my weekly adjustment. This is a doctor who knows me well. Very well. He could tell I was out of sorts. So I told him about my battle with the blues. Snapping my neck back into position, he said, “It might be time for you to take a journey.”
I raised an eyebrow, wondering where he might suggest. I’d heard about a great new spa in the Catskills.
“I’ve been facilitating healing journeys with plant medicine in my apartment across town for over a decade,” he began, immediately dashing all hopes of a glamorous get-away. He also dashed all hopes of a making a recovery. When I was in college and someone asked me if I wanted to do lines, I started reciting my monologue from Midsummer Night’s Dream. In other words, I don’t “journey” unless it’s been arranged by a travel agent. I told him as much.
“Well,” he said, realigning my shoulder, “it’s there as a healing option if you’d like to try it. You might have the wrong idea about what it entails. It isn’t druggy. Just affirming. And it would be my honor to facilitate your experience.”
I thought about his offer through the remainder of our session. As he cracked this and pressed that, I reviewed my history with SSRIs, SNRIs, MAOIs, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and anxiety meds. I’d tried them all and failed them all. In fact, I’ve been officially diagnosed with “treatment resistant depression.” (Not very hopeful, now, is it?) Which gave my chiropractor’s offer a greater sheen.
“You’d be there the whole time?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Will my head roll off my neck?” I wondered aloud. “Will my fingers turn into animal claws? Will I hear goblins and monsters telling me I’m a failure?”
“God, no!” my chiropractor gasped. “You think I’d ever be able to face Mr. Landau again if I let that happen to you?”
Mr. Landau and his wife still live in my parents building one floor above them. When I was a high school dancer, he heard me telling my mom about neck pain as we shared an elevator ride up to our respective floors. Before reaching our destination, Mr. Landau recommended I see his chiropractor, jotting down the number by heart on the back of his business card.
“He’s more than just a crack-this, crack-that hack. This guy is a real healer,” Mr. Landau said, handing me the card while my mom pressed the door open button. “I’m telling you—you’re going to thank me, and then some!”
Mr. Landau was a very conservative man; the founder of a prestigious law firm. He emanated trust.
I made an appointment immediately, thus beginning a forty-year relationship with a very special healer.
“I don’t want to push you into anything you don’t want to do,” this special healer now said as our session drew to a close.
“I want to try it,” I announced, because what else could I do? Sit around, wallowing in my sadness? No thank you.
And so, three days later, on a blue-skied balmy morning, I showed up at his apartment building on the upper east side where I was greeted by a friendly doorman who asked me for my name. As I said it, I held a little more tightly to a paper bag containing one small coconut yogurt, one zip lock of blueberries, another of low histamine nuts, and a third filled with peeled, sliced cucumber sticks. (Like a girl scout, I feel best when I’m prepared, even for a healing journey I feared as much as I anticipated.)
“He’s expecting you,” the doorman said, smiling and pointing me towards the elevator. How many people like me had the doorman sent up? Probably a lot. Suddenly, I felt shy; like I was going upstairs to do something ungirlscout like. Probably because I was even if I had peeled my cucumbers, washed my berries, and my yogurt was dairy-free
To my pleasant surprise, once I got to my chiropractor’s apartment, I discovered a pristine and serene oasis. Soft gray walls. Black wood floors. A Buddha statue in the foyer radiating "trust the process" energy. Tibetan bells vibrated through a hidden sound system. Everything was curated for calm. Even the refrigerator, where I stored my snacks, exuded minimalist calm.
We began on the couch, where my chiropractor proceeded to tell me—as he stroked his Yorkie, Ganesh—about plant medicine, and his own history of experimentation with it. As my doctor spoke, he handed me two small capsules he called “heart openers,” and nodded towards a glass of water that rested on the coffee table an arm’s length away. “It’s half the usual dose,” he added, sensing my hesitation. Then, bending his right elbow and raising the middle three fingers of his hand, he added, “scouts honor.”
That simple oath, spoken in my language, gave me the confidence I needed to move past fear. Swallowing both capsules at once—they were, after all, very small—I leaned back and listened as my chiropractor talked nonchalantly about plants with names like “Sassafras” and “Kana” as if they were as well-known as daisies and daffodils.
They changed his outlook and his marriage… He was calm and happy all the time, not just some of the time... He lived with purpose...
As he spoke, I waited to feel something, but, like the character Moralis, in A Chorus Line, I felt nothing. So, I asked what I should expect from these “heart openers.”
“Well,” he began, smiling into a pause like he was imagining cotton candy clouds and chocolate Ferris Wheels, “I gave you quite a bit of mistletoe.” He mentioned a few more herbs whose names blew right through one side of my brain and out the other. They weren’t exactly street drugs; nothing Walter White or Jesse Pinkman would have any interest in cooking in their Winnebago.
My chiropractor continued to explain that the combination of the herbs inside my capsules would have a similar effect to taking a very gentle MDMA trip. So I explained right back that I’ve never tried MDMA and therefore had no idea what this meant.
Tilting his head and squinting his kind eyes—at my middle-aged innocence? did he not believe me?— he said, “You’ll feel calmer. More accepting. You’ll relax.”
I thought about saying, “I am relaxed,” but I knew he knew me too well to believe it.
For the next thirty minutes, I felt nothing but fatigue. I hadn’t slept well the night before and my eyelids drooped a few times.
After 45 minutes had passed, my chiropractor offered me another capsule. Before accepting it, I thought about Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman who was drugged by her husband and raped by 72 of his friends and neighbors while he made videos that circulated on porn sites until he was finally caught. I thought about Bill Cosby and his victims. I thought about P. Diddy and the Baby Oil.
I looked into my chiropractor’s eyes and bit my lip. Then I said, “Nothing weird—”
He cut me off before I could finish the sentence.
“I’ve known you since you were 15,” he said earnestly. “That’s more than forty years. I’ve facilitated hundreds of these journeys. My wife is in the bedroom down the hall. This is what we do. We help people. We’re healers. You’re going to be okay. We have children ourselves. We get your concern but you’re going to be okay.”
I took a deep breath. Though the situation could go wrong with a different facilitator, I knew my chiropractor to be a very good man. I was going to have to take a leap of faith. So, I took that third capsule and I swallowed it.
“Come,” the doctor said, leading me down a short corridor and showing me into a small tidy guest room where a grey daybed beckoned. “Lie down. Rest while the herbs kick in. I’m going to take Ganesh for a quick walk.” He tossed me a soft blanket, then an eye mask. “I’ll wake you up when I get back and you can start your journey.”
The doctor was gone for a while; how long I couldn’t tell. Maybe it was the herbs beginning to work? I tried to sleep but was distracted by persistent pain emanating from my right elbow. When the doctor checked on me next, I told him about the discomfort.
He took a seat across from the bed and said, “You won’t feel any pain soon.” As he spoke, his offered me a small, gray, clay cup. It could have held sake or a shot of espresso, but it didn’t. It contained mushroom tea that had been steeping all morning in lemon and honey.
“Go ahead,” he said calmly; kindly. “You can trust it. It won’t hurt you.”
I polished the brew down in a two quick sips and handed the cup back.
“You’re about to have a healing experience,” my doctor said in velvet tones. “Tell yourself that. Understand? Keep repeating that. Say to yourself, ‘This is a healing experience.’”
So, I did, girl scout that I am. I said those words again and again until the journey began.
What followed was subtle—but profound. There were no hallucinations. No dancing hippos in tutus. Just the feeling that someone had upgraded me, emotionally, to first class. As birds chirped and twigs snapped in the background, I found myself thinking, with great calm and clarity, about hard areas in my life. Each thought —each potentially sharp and painful thought—was softened by what I can only describe as mental jasmine. Gentle tendrils of love curled around each idea, transforming worry into warmth.
As the journey went on, I realized that I was fine, in the deepest sense. I was on the right path. All the things I worried about didn’t require that intensity of angst. And I wasn’t broken; I just needed to have patience while I healed.
Music replaced the nature sounds. Exciting music. Rocky-running-up-the-steps-of-the-Philadelphia-Museum-of-Art kind of music. As it reached its crescendo, so did my feelings about myself. And, by God, I felt…worthy. Even hopeful. I felt whole.
“Everything is exactly as it should be,” I heard from deep in my subconscious. “All is well.”
The whole experience took about five hours. As I walked home across Central Park, the morning’s blue sky was replaced with gray. Thunder rumbled and a light drizzle quickly became a monsoon. I didn’t care. Soaking wet in seconds, my pink and white striped linen shirt sticking to my Lulu lemon sports bra, I filmed a video to send to my husband. It said, roughly, “When you’ve just taken mushrooms with your chiropractor and the heavens open up? You just get wet and say, “This feels awesome!”
A few days later, that lightness and hopefulness remain. And that’s why I’m writing this. We’re told depression requires meds, years of talk therapy and a highly curated vitamin stack. Maybe it does for some. But sometimes it just takes trusting someone who knows you, taking a leap of faith, and drinking mushroom tea on a Thursday morning.
Would I recommend the treatment to everyone? No. But if you’re someone who’s tried everything and you feel like there’s nothing left, maybe it’s time to reimagine what healing can look like.
As someone who’s spent her life chasing health, I’ll say this: the most powerful therapies are the ones that help you remember your own capability. The best therapies offers hope, and a felt sense of wholeness, even if it takes your chiropractor and a little plant magic to crack your heart open just wide enough to let the light back in.
Beautiful, Isabel! "...the most powerful therapies are the ones that help you remember your own capability." You are so very capable! Sending love and gratitude for this precious share.