Why Do We Call it Tripping?

A few years ago, my wife and I found ourselves  traveling through Friuli, a semi-autonomous region in Northern Italy. While roadtripping to the Dolomites, we made a pilgrimage to the village of San Daniele to sample some of their famous prosciutto. We stumbled upon this family-run butcher shop, and tucked in a quiet corner, adorned with dozens of drying ham hocks, was a little boutique where folks like us could purchase razor-thin slices of their world-renowned crudo cured in nothing but sea salt.

We met the matriarch of the operation and before I knew it, we were scuttling through a stilted conversation in bad Italian, broken English and wildly illustrative hand gestures. As we struggled to communicate, another customer jumped in and waxed poetically in perfect English about why this procuistto was the best in Italy. Her name was Anna, and she grew up just down the road.

I told her I live in Oregon, and she exclaimed excitedly that she has a friend who lives there too. I’d been on the road for a while, and I really didn’t feel like playing an impossible name game to see if I miraculously knew this person of hers. She persisted, and it turned out I actually did. Over 4 million people live in Oregon,  and I just happened to know the one person she knew—a woman who had remained a close friend since they lived together in Germany almost a decade ago. 

Anna couldn’t believe it. She was utterly flabbergasted and jumped into my arms for an awkward hug while cursing joyfully in Italian. She insisted we go to her family’s place for lunch. 10 minutes later, we were sitting around a table with her dad and brother sharing prosciutto, polenta, gnocchi, lambrusco and homemade grappa. Though a language barrier persisted—Anna was the only one in her family who spoke English—her brother taught me how to deftly twirl prosciutto around crostini and once her dad heard we were going to the Dolomites, he dusted off the VCR and showed us home videos from the 90s with Anna tearing down the slopes in her florescent American ski jacket.

Eventually, we said goodbye to the Castelanni family (after exchanging gifts of course) and sputtered down the road in our rented Fiat though it felt like we were floating through the Italian countryside. Such was the power of the spontaneous journey and the inherent kindness of strangers.

Packing Our Bags for a Mushroom Trip

So why in the sam heck am I sharing this random serendipitous story on a blog about psilocybin-assisted therapy? Well, I’ve been thinking about the clichés and nomenclature we use in this industry and after a few transformative travel experiences in the last few years, I’ve realized that a trip is indeed, a perfect way to summarize a psychedelic experience. And furthermore, the more we open ourselves up to potential detours, the more dynamic and transformative our journeys become. Just like the trips we take on vacation—this doesn’t have to be through nowhere Italy—our psychedelic journeys require deliberate preparation, an unflinching courage to wander into unknown territory and a persistent curiosity while we’re navigating the experience.

Before we actually travel, our innate curiosity is already unlocked. For one reason or another—otherworldly ramen, a certain wine, a music festival or compelling local traditions—we’ve been called to a place, us and we book our tickets and make reservations to finally experience a culture that’s been on our minds for a while.

As the trip approaches, we talk to friends, scour internet forums, read travel guides and educate ourselves about the destination in question. We script certain days well ahead of time because we don’t want to miss an opportunity to wander through a heritage site or sample some of the region’s signature food and drink. And we don’t skimp on the practical either. With an eye on the forecast and typical weather patterns, we pack our bags so we’re comfortable once we emerge into an unfamiliar world. As our departure date approaches, we’re riddled with excitement, apprehension and hope.

We work through a very similar checklist when preparing for a mushroom journey in our own backyards. We’ve already unlocked that curiosity, this idea that the mushrooms can help us see the world in a new light. Then, we talk to friends, scour online threads and learn about the joys and dangers of hurtling through uncharted territory. Once we determine the benefits outweigh the potential hazards, we prepare. Since we’ve done our research, we know that set and setting our extremely important; we understand a trained facilitator can amplify your safety and accelerate our integration as well.

We then begin to think deeply about our psychedelic destination. We know mushrooms tend to stir up pain, anguish, frustration and shame, so we start to look inward and bubble up these feelings to the surface. We understand that mushrooms can be overwhelming, so we lean into wellness rituals that could help us in case of psychedelic turbulence. As our journey day approaches, we get nervous, excited and everything in between. After all, we’re about to traverse unknown territory, but lucky for us, we’ve brought more than just the hoodies on our backs. We know what the psychedelic terrain looks like; we’ve built a safe container with our guide(s), and we’re genuinely curious to immerse ourselves in an unpredictable habitat.

A Heaping Dose of Wanderlust

All that said, meticulous preparation doesn’t guarantee a magical traveling experience. It’s easy to overpack, to overscript our days and run blindly from place to place without immersing ourselves at all. The best kind of travel embraces preparation but indulges whimsy and makes room for spontaneity. Indeed, the enlightened traveler seeks out connections and opens themselves up to whatever they stumble upon.

My afternoon with the Castelannis illustrates this duality. Without preparation, I wouldn’t have heard from a friend that prosciutto from San Daniele was the best in Italy. If we didn’t plan on hiking through the Dolomites, we wouldn’t have rented that ugly little Fiat and been able to pass through the village in question. Obviously, going to Anna’s for lunch was not on our regularly scheduled program. Her invitation forced us to delay our arrival to the Dolomites and miss out on one of our scheduled hikes. But it was the best moment of our trip because it was spontaneous, authentic and nearly unbelievable.

Mushroom journeys are the same. While we can surface our pain and sorrow and practice self-care on the lead-up to the ceremony, we must make ourselves vulnerable and willing to accommodate side roads and detours. Our prevailing trip mantra is to follow the mushrooms wherever they go. By attempting to steer the ship away from certain painful thoughts or memories, we will become helpless and miserable. So, yeah preparation helps us approach the journey with just the right amount of rigor, but it also demands we must be ready to throw the script out the window and whole-heartedly follow the mushrooms through unknown territory.

Following the Breadcrumbs Home

And the metaphor doesn’t stop here. Let’s fast forward to the end of our vacations and lean into the magic of coming home. After spending several days on the road—every day a shimmering blank page in parts unknown—we’re often filled with relief to turn the Fiat around and find our way back home. It’s in this moment where we find catharsis, begin to catalog what we witnessed and glow with the gratitude of the weary traveler. No longer must we worry about losing our passports, a communication breakdown which put us on the wrong train or the overly rude clerk who had us second-guessing the magic of a people and place. We are, finally, coming home.

And yeah you guessed it, mushroom journeys mirror this phenomenon. Once we spend a few hours on the barely trafficked roads of our psyche, we’re often filled with relief as the road begins to bend back toward reality and our selves. Our inward journeys are often so profound and raw that the prospect of normal things—drinking a smoothie, looking out the window and watching people on the sidewalk—shine with a brilliant, compelling light. Sure, it’s not always easy. As the world begins to come back into view, we might feel a little estranged from reality itself, but after a few hours, the gratitude arrives and we often return to a more vibrant version of the place we left behind.

A Time for Reflection

The best thing about taking a trip? It’s that we bring lessons back from the experience. Roadtripping through Italy taught me that slowing down can indeed be seamlessly incorporated into my daily routine. I learned not only to embrace but to court new experience, and I fell in love with cucina povera, the peasant food traditions of Friuli. During my last psychedelic trip, when I didn’t move from the bed or open my eyes for four hours, I learned to be less vigilant all the time, to be patient with myself, and to embrace the dizzying mystery of the universe.

That said, learning implies effort and application. We all know people who seem to be traveling all the time, darting from continent to continent and collecting stamps on their passports like they’re going out of style. These folks don’t readily make space to reflect on their extraordinary journeys and tend to return home unscathed and unchanged. The same is true for a profound and complex mushroom journey. If we don’t actively work through our insight, we’ll find ourselves—just a few months removed from our actual trip—actively planning another journey and hoping in vain for a light switch to flip.

The Psychedelic Souvenir

In conclusion, whether we’re traveling via ancient plant medicine or rusty Fiat, we’re bound to learn something about ourselves and our relationship with the world. Preparation will not only help us optimize our journeys, but it will give us the confidence to drop into a place we’ve never ever felt or seen. Once we land in destination, we must keep out an eye out for paths that manifest before us and once we get home, we must bask in the afterglow of our trips AND reflect on its lessons, too.

That said, there’s one gorgeous outlier when we’re traveling via mushroom and eye mask. Our excursions through foreign realms come equipped with an irresistible thud of meaning. It’s not the rushed epiphany that comes from the third glass of chianti overlooking the Bay of Naples. It’s more of a mandate from the soul, one crafted by gratitude and patience, one that shimmers like a harvest moon and reverberates with the power of prayer.