The Coolest Mushroom Trip of My Life

In my ~11 years of psychedelic adventures, I’ve been on many different rides.

From heart-melting euphoria to midnight black rage to ancient sorrow…

The Mushroom Realm, for better and for worse, has given me many gifts—but none of been as cool as my experience this past Sunday. Behold, the tale:

Part 1. Preparation

This trippy adventure began like many others before:

A slow morning spent stuffing powdered magic mushrooms into capsules, because I’ve become too much of a baby to eat them otherwise. Preparing fruity snacks, filling water bottles, rounding up notebooks and pens, gathering blankets, and packing all the things and stuff into a bag or two.

Then before embarking on the 30 minute trek to The Office—a secluded, off-the-beaten-path piece of forest tucked away in a park near my home—with Justin and Alicia, down the hatch go the mushroom-stuffed capsules.

Regardless of flying solo or in the company of friends, the walk into the woods is often silent, save for the odd question about what one hopes or intends to get out of the looming experience. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I use this walk to mentally prepare, nudged along by the gradually intensifying tendrils of sensation from the mushroom realm creeping into and through me.

Upon arriving at The Office, with limbs growing heavy, sensation coursing from head to toe, the woods beginning to warp, pulse, dilate, and fractalize around me, the time was nigh to settle down, strap in, and enjoy the ride.

Part 2. Here We Go

Since my last trip to The Office many moons ago, someone else appears to have found the space and begun building a tree fort. Although tree fort is a generous description at this point, as there’s little more than two planks loosely secured between a triangle of trees, along with a little ladder.

Inspired by my cat Yuki, who loves to climb and perch, I clambered up onto the platform, laid out my blanket, rolled my cloak into a pillow, and sprawled on my back, looking up, up, up through trees so tall you can’t see the tops.

I’ve learned over many trips into the mushroom realm that I prefer to handle exiting the normal world and entering the weird one with my eyes closed, breathing, stretching, and scanning my body for any energetic detritus that I’ve been clinging to, is stuck, and in need of relinquishing into the ether.

Sometimes this internal cleansing is scary, uncomfortable, overwhelming, even painful to navigate—but on this occasion, on this glorious day in the woods, I actually had fun and enjoyed letting go of two things.

Before I share what was let go of, I’m proud to add that this particular trip was far and away the best job of I’ve ever done of letting go and surrendering to the experience. As sensation coursed through my body, the world wiggled around me, and energy flowed thick and fast from head to toe… Instead of trying to capture, contain, control the experience, I, in all senses of the phrase, tipped myself backwards and let down my walls, allowing for whatever would happen to happen. I even briefly felt the sensation of falling backwards.

Part 3. Two Moments of Letting Go

The first instance of letting go was that of a past partner. The pain of losing her in 2016, and the life I’d envisioned for us, has affected me profoundly ever since, and in ways I’m still understanding. Moving on hasn’t been easy, and has often felt like fighting an emotional civil war. Even so, I’ve worked hard on coming to a place of acceptance, being okay with the fact that our paths weren’t aligned, and understanding that we wanted different things.

What follows felt like an important, and perhaps, final step in this process.

My mind awash in a bolus of liquidy bubblegum pink energy, inhaling as much of the forest air as I could, I felt—and saw—my remaining energetic tendrils of attachment break free from my body and fade into the ether. I remember saying goodbye, and feeling happy for the path she’s found.

The second instance of letting go was that of Katsu, the cat from three doors down who I was lucky enough to share a blissful few months. Since she stopped coming around in May, despite knowing with dreadful certainty that she likely won’t visit again (mostly due to our landlords’ obnoxious new dog), I’ve clung to a shred of hope that one day I’d look out the back door to see her lion-like face waiting in the window, meowing to come in. Curiously, over the past few weeks, I’ve developed a mysterious, dull, lingering pain deep in my right shoulder with no obvious cause. As I lay in the trees, extending my consciousness into that pain, I realized the root cause was from clinging to hope of Katsu’s unlikely return. So I adjusted my body to create a stretch through my shoulder, sunk into my breath, and nudged that same liquidy bubblegum pink energy towards the pain. Lo and behold, there was release.

Part 4. Two Amazing Discoveries

With what felt like the most important and pressing emotional work being complete, I began poking and prodding around the edges of my mental and visual experience, letting my mind wander towards what may.

Perhaps my most fascinating discovery was that by this point, completely suffused into the mushroom realm, what appeared in my visual field was the exact same regardless of whether my eyes were open or closed, albeit in slightly different hues—like swiping through filters to overlay a picture with.

I’ve never had anything like this happen before, and was wholly amazed.

Continuing down the track of amazing things, for the first time in my 11-odd years of psychedelic adventuring, I found, felt, and held the sense of collective oneness and global unity that people so often report. I felt deeply connected to Alicia and Justin, who I was with in the forest, despite both being out of sight. I felt my friend Erik, in a bird soaring above the trees.

Then I travelled around the world to lands and cultures I’ve never experienced in the flesh: Africa, the Middle East, India, central and eastern Asia.

Everywhere I went, I felt kinship. Finally seeing, feeling, and experiencing this sense of global consciousness, I then went looking for the source underlying this connection. I was captivated by the question of, if we’re all connected, all one, and come from the same source… Where and what is this one source?

Alas, I never found an answer to that question—but I did think of a beautiful, if unrealistic way to solve all of humanity’s problems… Which is to gather every single person on earth into the same place, have everyone take a hefty dose of mushrooms, then allow the earth to consume us. My thinking was that if everyone is tapped into this same sense of unity, all our reasons for conflict would fade away, nor would any of us need anything. We could simply be.

Part 5. Two Curious Experiences

Muddled somewhere into the timeline of the above, Justin had slipped into his breathwork practice, which involved humming—and the most curious experience unfolded. As he’d hum, the liquid bubblegum pink energy I was playing with reacted to the sound. I’d been moving the energy through my body, but upon hearing and feeling the vibrations Justin was putting out, the entirety of my liquidy pink energy bolus rushed into the top left corner of my head—the closest point of my body to where Justin was seated in the forest.

My energy responding to Justin’s humming was curious experience #1.

As for curious experience #2, this energetic resonance triggered my third-ever instance of what I can best describe as hyper-intense empathy that I feel in the marrow of my bones and carry with me moving forward. This isn’t simply relating to someone’s experience, but understanding them on a depth where I feel as if I’ve merged with their body, mind, and spirit.

The first time I experienced this awesome empathy relates to electronic music producer Avicii, who took his life in April 2018. During a mushroom trip 5 months later, surely triggered by listening to one of his albums, I suddenly understood the deep, relentless, hopeless pain that drove him to take his life—and have carried that intimate understanding with me ever since.

The second time I experienced such empathy was during a mushroom trip in September 2021, when I understood the kind of sorrow and craving for release that drives people to cut themselves. I nearly picked up a knife myself.

In a refreshing change of pace, this third experience with hyper-intense empathy was not so heavy. Instead, I gained complete understanding of Yuki’s nervous curiosity about a male cat in the neighbourhood who paid us a visit on the morning of this adventure. In a flash of understanding, I knew she didn’t want to attack him as she has other cats, but get to know him.

Part 6. Two ‘Out There’ Ideas

From empathy, my mind then stumbled upon a couple of far out ideas.

The first is to do with child birth, and how modern medicine’s ability to keep alive many mothers and children who wouldn’t have otherwise survived has contributed to our global over-population. In times long-since past, a higher mortality would have been nature’s way of keeping the population in check, as well as weeding out genetic weakness. I realized that modern medicine allows us to cheat death—for which there will be a collective price to pay.

But the element of this idea that forced an audible wow out of me was the idea that the mother dying in childbirth makes a lot of sense—a life for a life. After all, creating life is a huge energetic expenditure, and a piece of the mother is transferred into the child. Should death not be expected?

My second ‘out there’ idea relates to our individual ability to breathe effectively, and the likelihood of physical and mental developmental problems in those whose breathing is hindered. In this moment, I began breathing into parts of my face in particular that felt as if they’d not been oxygenated in ages, if ever—and tension melted away from nose, around my eyes, and throughout my cheekbones. And I felt how a lack of oxygen in these areas over time had contributed to the formation of my bone structure.

Part 7. Play Time

All the above unfolded over the course of two hours or so whilst flat on my back, hanging in the trees. At long last, with my emotional work done, new understanding of the universe tucked into my noggin, and some big ideas to chew on, I felt capable of standing on two feet, ready to have some fun.

Rising, then descending from the cat tree left just for me, I channeled Yuki’s relentlessly playful energy and charged off into the forest, Justin in tow, plowing through deer trails and forging my own path where necessary.

I found a lightning tree, a spider tree, and the most perfect climbing tree I’ve ever done seen—with branches perfectly placed in a circular, ascending fashion that you could climb to the very top if you felt so inclined.

On numerous occasions, I found myself struck by how light, joyous, and happy I felt—which are all emotions I’ve struggled to feel into for ages now.

I don’t want to label this particular trip as the best one of my life, because each psychedelic experience is so different, offering an array of lessons, insight, and wisdom… But due to the visual manifestation of the energy I was playing with, there being no difference in my visual field between eyes open and closed, and the global sense of unity I felt, this was the coolest  trip of all.

With love from the forest,

~ Alexander Mullan